Abstract
Abstract Translanguaging has gained prominence as a way to understand multilingual practices and draw on these in additional language teaching, but questions remain regarding its application in various educational contexts. This study investigates the significance of translanguaging across instructional settings by comparing discourses of markedness in accelerated, mainstream, and sheltered classes taught by the same teacher, where both linguistically majoritized and minoritized students were learning English as an additional language. Data are drawn from four months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a Norwegian upper secondary school and include field notes, video and screen recordings, texts, language portraits, and teacher and student interviews. I found that translanguaging was marked in two largely separate ways: (1) bilingual English-Norwegian practices were more frequently marked in accelerated and mainstream settings, in relation to students’ perceived English proficiency level; whereas (2) translanguaging drawing on minoritized languages was more consistently marked in all three settings as a deviation from majority linguistic practices, thus distinguishing majoritized (English-Norwegian) from minoritized translanguaging. Implications include the importance of analyzing translanguaging in relation to locally salient discourses and contextualizing pedagogical interventions in larger struggles for justice.
Highlights
Translanguaging has gained prominence as a way to understand multilingual practices and draw on these in additional language teaching, but questions remain regarding its application in various educational contexts
The current study aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution to debates concerning translanguaging in additional language education by comparing patterns and discourses of translanguaging in three English classes taught by the same teacher, using the same curriculum, where one is an accelerated class, one a mainstream class, and one a sheltered class for recent immigrants who have struggled with the subject
The current study adds a comparative dimension to the study of classroom translanguaging by examining patterns and discourses of language use in three English classes taught by the same teacher, following the same national curriculum, but composed of three groups that were distinguished by previous subject achievement: a mainstream grade 11 English class, an accelerated class taking the course one year early based on high subject achievement, and a sheltered class for recent immigrants repeating the course based on low achievement in the previous year
Summary
Translanguaging can be seen as both a theoretical and an educational proposal (García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014). Translanguaging has usually been identified in practices that might conventionally be described as bilingual or multilingual (e.g., Duarte 2019; García and Kleyn 2016; Mary and Young 2017), but this is theoretically only the case because of a focus on learners who are stigmatized for using resources identified with multiple languages, rather than racialized or working-class varieties of a majority language (cf Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosiers et al 2018) Another approach has been to identify translanguaging in critical or creative language use that plays with transgression of linguistic categories such as languages or registers (Baynham and Lee 2019; Li Wei 2018). I suggest that markedness (e.g., Flores and Rosa 2015, 2019; Meeuwis and Blommaert 1994; Myers-Scotton 1993) can be useful for understanding translanguaging in relation to the specific locally salient discourses it challenges or transcends
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