Creating a translanguaging space through Languaging: Reflections on design as English Language Specialist in Vietnam

Abstract

I am thankful for this invitation to say a few things about translanguaging. Since I just returned from Vietnam as an English Language Specialist for a translanguaging project, I thought it would be refreshing to situate my short note around the activities I created for translanguaging workshops in Vietnam. The translanguaging project encompassed three phases. Phase I and Phase II were conducted online and the tangible product is our translanguaging pedagogy booklets for K-12 English language teachers in Vietnam. The translanguaging project is large in scale, but I will only mention names with whom I collaborated with directly. This serves as my first step to contextualize my stance on translanguaging. The inner circle of the team were Specialists Mary Shepard Wong and myself, plus our Vietnamese counterparts, Dr. Vũ Thị Thanh Nhã, Ms. Trần Kiều Hạnh VNU, and Dr. Le Van Canh. In light of the social phenomenological nature of translanguaging, I see the project as a distributed cognitive system (Hutchins, 1995), which also included but was not limited to the workshop participants, RELOs, Zoom-mediated collaborative activities, my first-person perspective on translanguaging, and my observer’s experiences in Vietnam. It is the interactivity of all these microsystems that contextualize my stance and design. However, the theoretical positioning and activity design are of my own, so is my gratitude for the opportunity to work on this pioneering project.