Translanguaging in a Monoglot Context: Children Mobilising and (Re) Positioning their Multilingual Repertoires as Resources for Learning

Abstract

Most postcolonial contexts have been marked by language regimes that (re)produce the imposition of one language (such as English) as dominant over others, often with the formal standard variety being legitimised and promoted as linguistic capital. Despite the reality of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in the twenty-first century, multilingual practices are all too often silenced, rendered invisible and considered as an impediment to standard language and literacy development. Many educational systems continue to follow policies that are based on traditional conceptualisations of languages as discreet, autonomous, hermetically-sealed units; consequently characterising children’s rich experiences, multilingual skills or ‘funds of knowledge’ detrimental to learning in general. This chapter aims to foreground the tension between deeply entrenched institutional ideologies favoring English, and the complex linguistic repertoires that children bring to their school experiences. The specific focus will be on ways in which children draw on and employ a range of linguistic repertoires available to them, in a strategic and integrated manner, to (re)construct knowledge and negotiate meaning. Using a translanguaging framework, this article aligns itself with the body of research on bi/multilingual education that challenges hegemonic monolingual and monocultural practices, and support initiatives that validate learners’ plurilingualism in our classrooms. The research site is a racially desegregated primary school in South Africa, where black working class learners have replaced white middle class learners. My analysis shows that the insertion of a range of multilingual resources here illuminates children’s ability to navigate the dominant monoglot strictures of the school and to carve out for themselves spaces for their own voices, often silenced in the classroom. I argue that the emergence of translanguaging practices in the public space of the classroom demonstrate children’s agentive (re)positioning of themselves as meaning-makers, knowledge creators and linguistically resourceful and competent.