Translanguaging as Norm: Rejecting Narrow and Restrictive Notions of Reading

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we bring different fields into conversation as a way of expanding understandings about the teaching of reading, centering the communicative practices of multilingual children. Instead of seeking to remedy children whose communicative practices and norms do not align with “academic language,” we traverse fields to show how seemingly innocuous concepts and related undertakings may harm young multilingual children by sponsoring pathological paradigms that frame their ways of communicating as inferior and/or wrong. Challenging the monoglossic gaze that upholds and reifies monolingual ideologies, we consider how teachers might rethink longstanding albeit narrow, restrictive, and exclusionary conceptualizations of language and literacy, moving toward reconceptualizing languages and literacies plurally, expansively, and inclusively. After doing so, we discuss the power and possibility of translanguaging‐‐conceptually and empirically. We conclude by offering resources that can help foster, cultivate, and sustain translanguaging in classrooms and (pre)schools.