Code-switching is metaphor, translanguaging is metonymy: a transdisciplinary view of bilingualism and its role in education

Abstract

ABSTRACT How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how active bilingual learners/users of English (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics to explain how code-switching is metaphor, an external perspective of bilingualism as inter-domain linguistic mapping and translanguaging is metonymy, an internal perspective of intra-domain linguistic mapping. By placing translanguaging/metonymy on the syntagmatic axis and code-switching/metaphor on the paradigmatic axis, I demonstrate through example sentences of monolingual and bilingual speech and figures, how accepting the inaccurate metaphor of bilingualism as just code-switching alone, sets in motion countless dichotomies that act to create the bilingualism-as-problem orientation for ABLE students in U.S. schools; most specifically for those at the intersection of bilingualism and disability. A transdisciplinary view of bilingualism includes both an internal perspective (translanguaging, metonymic combination of parts of the whole linguistic repertoire on the syntagmatic axis), plus an external perspective (code-switching, metaphoric alternation of linguistic features from diverse named languages on the paradigmatic axis). I conclude with implications for a more appropriate description of bilingualism and its role in education.