Translanguaging as Everyday Practice. An Introduction

Abstract

This volume shows a consistent engagement with the concept and practice of translanguaging as a means to understand how bilingual and multilingual individuals strategically mobilise and make use of linguistic and semiotic resources and modalities to construct meaning and carry out the different tasks of their everyday life. By translanguaging as everyday practice, we mean complexes of situated, processual and interactional communicative practices. The latter are sensitive to how linguistic and semiotic material, including named languages, are creatively and critically processed by speakers to construct and organise their everyday life, by acquiring knowledge about the context and the participants involved in the interaction. The everyday corresponds to a space which is strategically shaped by a meaningful action-context nexus where social practices, identities and ideologies can be (re)negotiated and (re)constructed, as well as opposed and subverted. The strength of this volume lies in the plurality of approaches and a range of attentions that place translanguaging within an interdisciplinary framework. By bringing together scholars working on translanguaging from different research perspectives, namely bilingual education, heritage languages, conversational analysis, linguistic landscape, arts and cultural performance, this volume testifies to translanguaging as an interdisciplinary and critical research paradigm. This chapter starts with a brief overview of translanguaging as theory (1.1) and everyday practice (1.2), continues with a brief discussion on the importance of translanguaging in understanding twenty-first century multilingualism (1.3), and concludes with a broad overview of the chapters in the volume (1.4).