Multilingual Perspective Research Articles

Role of translation in teaching foreign lan-guages

Problem. Since people started communicating in different languages the various approaches and methods have been used throughout the history of language learning. During this time, there were and still are disputes regarding the most effective methods of teaching foreign languages. Such discussions include the choice between the classical grammar-translation method, which once prevailed in the methodology of teaching foreign languages, especially "dead" languages, the so-called "direct" method, which rejects the use of the native language, and the mediation method, which arose as the result of rethinking the formal and cultural goals of language learning. Mediation is analyzed as one of the most up-to-date method as it is not only a translation, but also a new formulation and summarization, which further emphasizes the ubiquitous nature of mediation in foreign language communication. In the perspective of multilingualism, mediation is considered as natural inter- and intra-lingual communication. Using the term mediation, the specific forms of which are translation and interpretation, the fact is emphasized that translation is a part of everyday, natural and spontaneous communication and corresponds to the desire for mutual understanding. Goal. The purpose of this article is to consider the evolution of the role of translation in the process of learning foreign languages since the beginning of this subject. Methodology. The purpose and specificity of the study determined the use of the method of description with elements of comparative analysis for a comprehensive coverage of the issue. Results. The article showed the stages of evolution in teaching translation which still have more than one approach and requires deep study. Originality. The is an analysis of the translation science development. Those whom this subject concerns may find it interesting to go deep into the history and follow the analysis of old and new practices in the subject. Practical value. Certain issues in the article can help the teachers organize the process of translation teaching in the class and as an individual students’ work.

Review of Blumczynski & Wilson (2023): The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare

Review of Blumczynski & Wilson (2023): The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare

Teacher beliefs about teaching French as a foreign language in a Chinese university: a multilingual perspective

While French is an important European language being taught in Chinese universities, not much is known about French language teachers’ beliefs about its teaching as a foreign language, particularly not from a multilingual perspective. Adopting a multiple-case design, this study examined 5 French language teachers’ beliefs about the French language and the learner. Analysing data collected via interviews, the study revealed that teachers’ beliefs reflected neither the linguistic landscape of the French language nor the learner’s existing level of multilingualism. However, the teachers’ monolingual ideology as reflected in their beliefs seemed to co-exist with beliefs that reflected their multilingual ideology; the cultural capital brought by learning French as a foreign language prevailed in teachers’ beliefs about the language with reference to the value of French learning in their students’ future international communication in a multilingual world, and the teachers also perceived their students as French learners with English learning experience that could lend support to their French learning. FUNDING INFORMATION. This research was funded by “Research on the Innovation of Foreign Language Education in China” (grant number: 22JJD740011), a major project of the Key Research Institutes of Humanities and Social Sciences under the Ministry of Education, as well as supported by the Beijing Foreign Studies University “Double First-Class” Fund (project title: “Construction of Standards for Foreign Language Education and Foreign Language Talents Training in Higher Education”, project number: 2022SYLZD010).

Exploring the use of ICT by language instructors at a university in Kazakhstan: Expectations, realities, and factors influencing adoption

The field of English Language Teaching (ELT) is undergoing a revolutionary shift in response to the spread of English as a lingua franca around the world, aligning itself with the needs of English as a tool for international communication (Cameron & Galloway, 2019). This change calls for a closer look at how teachers use information and communication technology (ICT) in ELT and how they view the changing environment. Research on educators’ attitudes about the use of ICT is crucial to examine before adopting such changes to ICT use practices, since this offers invaluable insights into the viability of curriculum innovation in language teaching and learning. There have been more studies addressing language attitudes on ICT use, but there remains a scarcity of studies that look at instructors’ views regarding ICT use beliefs from the perspective of multilingualism. Even though the body of knowledge about language instructors’ attitudes has grown, few studies have looked at teachers’ attitudes about ICT use from the perspective of their multilingualism (Dalvit, 2010). By filling this important gap, the current study aims to clarify how instructors’ perceptions of English, Russian and Kazakh in Kazakhstan’s higher education context interact with micro (personal beliefs), meso (colleagues in the department) and macro (wider environment). These attitudes have the potential to have a substantial impact on how successfully ICT use approaches are incorporated into a multilingual educational environment. Our understanding of how teachers’ ICT use attitudes manifest within the Kazakh multilingual context.

Rethinking of EMI in higher education: a critical view on its scope, definition and quality

ABSTRACT Although it has grown at an exponential rate globally, English medium instruction’s (EMI) conceptually problematic nature steered more confusion than clarity and consensus in the contexts of higher education (HE). In the field literature, the dominant paradigm pertains to descriptive statements rather than definitions and research seemed to reach a saturation point where a new vision is required that of problem solving. By employing a critical stance towards globalisation hence internationalisation and opting for a multilingual perspective, this conceptual paper presents arguments firstly on the concepts that are involved in the definition of EMI and then on EMI teacher training and EMI policy while keeping a focus on learning in EMI HE settings. In so doing, definitions for the concepts of EMI and EMI quality are provided as prospective reference points for HE stakeholders to adhere to during their EMI development practices. Concluding remarks on internationalization as being one of the motivations to implement EMI in HE settings and calls for research on critical EMI and EMI content teacher competencies are also provided.

Translanguaging Approach in English Classroom: Sentiment Analysis of Multilingual Indian Teachers' Perspective

Recent developments in India, the National Education Policy 2020, promote using the home language or mother tongue as the medium of instruction until Grade 5 and beyond. This paper explores the attitudes of multilingual teachers in India toward using translanguaging in English language teaching. Forty-five samples were collected, and the researcher measured thirteen translanguaging parameters to assess the attitudes of multilingual teachers. Using the VADER method, the researcher converted the translanguaging corpus and identified positive, negative, neutral, and compound sentiment scores. The results showed that most respondents had a neutral sentiment toward translanguaging. The researcher used a heat map to visualize the data, producing four clusters labeled Positive, Neutral, Negative, and Compound Sentiments of translanguaging. It can be concluded that adopting translanguaging might help create a more inclusive and powerful educational environment in multilingual countries like India because language ideologies influence how people perceive linguistic skills and practices.

Introducing “Trans~Resistance”: Translingual Literacies as Resistance to Epistemic Racism and Raciolinguistic Discourses in Schools

Translingual students’ identities transcend multiple languages and cultural allegiances. Sociolinguistics widely discusses the linguistic and racial oppressions these students face in schools due to epistemic racism, which is often observed in the tension between their multilingual and multimodal communicative styles and language perspectives rooted in monolingual and monocultural ideologies. This paper expands on the literature that denounces epistemic racism, uses Raciolinguistics and New Literacy Studies as theoretical frameworks, and reports on the following inquiries: What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization? Critical focus groups, semi-structured and arts-based interviews, and emplaced observations were used to collect data, centering the identities and voices of participants. Two key findings emerged. First, school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degree of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. Second, “Translinguals” resist through novel concepts for which I have coined the terms "Covert and Overt Transresistance,” enacted by the means of resisting transliteracies. The theoretical, research, and practical implications of these findings, along with recommendations for future research, are discussed.

Between multilingual ethos and English pathos: how do multilingual scholars navigate international academia?

This paper reports on a research project which asked scholars to speak about their multilingual and collaborative academic practices. This case study sheds light on the complex and multilayered linguistic choices made by multilingual scholars to comply with the diverse requirements of a multilingual academic life, namely the adoption of EMI (English Medium Instruction). This contribution starts by reconstructing and discussing from a multilingual perspective the different concepts composing EMI. Then, the results of the empirical study, a questionnaire for researchers, are shown by means of descriptive statistics (for the closed questions) and content analysis (for the open questions). Scholars’ agency to move across languages depending on their assignments and tensions surrounding the use of English in European universities are emphasised in the discussion. This study allows us to see in a new light the concept and research on EMI, and to envisage new relations between English, instruction, and publication in Higher Education, embracing the broader concept of ‘English as one medium in academic life’.

To impart knowledge or to adhere to policy: Unpacking language ideologies and practices in Chinese EMI courses through a translanguaging lens

Due to the internationalization and marketization of higher education and the increasing prevalence of English as a global language, higher education institutions worldwide have implemented English medium instruction (EMI) courses, highlighting the necessity to examine how languages are chosen and practised in EMI courses. With a mixed-method triangulation approach, this study collected data through classroom observation, questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews in order to investigate teachers’ and students’ language choices and practices in EMI classrooms at a Chinese university. The questionnaire results showed that although the respondents slightly preferred English-only practice, they found it difficult to implement it and would resort to translanguaging practices, confirming an inconsistency between language ideologies and language practices. The observation findings revealed the adoption of translanguaging for meaning comprehension, terminology explanation and translation of local elements, while interview findings revealed three types of student participants, i.e. believers, sceptics, and inbetweeners, towards translanguaging practice in EMI courses. In contrast, most of the teachers held a favourable stance towards the English-only practice in EMI courses. While the participants all regarded translanguaging practices as facilitators for language and content learning, they believed that hierarchical relationships do not exist among languages. This study carries important implications to bridge the gap between language ideologies and language practices and call for attention to developing language practice from a multilingual perspective.

Multilingualism and Beyond: Implications for Education

Introduction: The JLE editors explore multilingual perspectives in language learning, education, and society, as compared with mono- and bilingual perspectives. The notion of a separate language system turned out to be far from today’s multilingual communications. The approaches to multiple language learning have dramatically changed towards multilingualism. The editorial review aims to consider the potential of the field for the JLE.
 Basic Terminology and Definitions: the JLE editors dwell upon the key terms applicable to the field of multilingualism, including multilingualism on its own, plurilingualism, bilingualism, multilinguality, polylingualism, metrolingualism, heteroglossia, and linguistic repertoire.
 Research on Multilingualism and beyond: in this section, the JLE readers can find a short review of the research publications on multilingualism, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and linguistic repertoire indexed in the Scopus database.
 Conclusion: multilingualism as a research field has a perspective for the Journal of Language and Education. Multilingualism is a many-faceted field, developing rather fast. Research on multilingualism may enrich the scope of the JLE and attract new readers.

Multidialectal and multilingual translanguaging in L2 Arabic classrooms: teachers’ beliefs vs. actual practices

This study adopts a multidialectal and multilingual translanguaging perspective to explore the relationship between beliefs and actual linguistic practices concerning multilingual and multidialectal practices among L2 Arabic teachers in Islamic independent schools in Sydney, NSW, Australia. To this end, the study draws on class observations and individual interviews. The findings show a clear mismatch between teachers’ beliefs about the use of English and their actual employment of it in the classroom. The majority of the teachers indicated that English should be either limited or totally avoided in the L2 Arabic classroom, but class observations showed that (a) English was utilized in all 11 classes, and (b) it was used significantly more than Arabic in nine of these classes. As for multidialectal practices, although most of the teachers believed that the use of non-standard varieties along with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) should be limited, findings were inconclusive due to the fact that English was found to be the main medium of communication in the majority of the observed classes. Therefore, the study underscores the need for providing teacher training that demonstrates how to purposefully deploy multilingual and multidialectal translanguaging to help learners enrich their linguistic repertoire in their desired L2.

MULTILINGUAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRANSLANGUAGING

TESOL JournalEarly View e724 MEDIA REVIEW MULTILINGUAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRANSLANGUAGING Onur Özkaynak, Corresponding Author Onur Özkaynak [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9239-581X The Ohio State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Onur Özkaynak, Corresponding Author Onur Özkaynak [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9239-581X The Ohio State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.724Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issuee724 RelatedInformation

Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)

Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pp. 196 ISBN: 9780367363475 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429351075 (eBook)

Multilingual cyberpragmatics in instructional settings. Exploring gender and age effects in Catalan, Spanish and English email requests

ABSTRACT The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students’ email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17(1), 60–80], requests tend to be more direct and they may not match with the degree of imposition or social distance involved. Students’ lack of netiquette and the lack of physical presence on the Internet may influence their pragmatic behaviour. In addition to that, other studies [Barón, J., & Ortega, M. (2018). Investigating age differences in e-mail pragmatic performance. System, 78, 148–178] point to age effects and further confirm the preference for direct pragmatic forms. Nevertheless, very few studies have adopted a multilingual perspective. For this reason, we have examined 250 email requests to faculty. Openings and requests produced in Catalan, Spanish or English were analysed. Our main goal was to confirm whether students’ requests would devoid politeness markers and whether openings would show a lack of netiquette. We were also interested in identifying age and gender effects and in finding out if the pragmatic forms chosen would be in line with the politeness orientation of the language involved. Results are in line with previous studies but they also contradict them adding interesting information on the way multilingualism is displayed in email interaction.

Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes: Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice

Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes: Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice

Mul-FaD: attention based detection of multiLingual fake news.

The latest buzzword in today's world is fake news. The circulation of false information influences elections, public health, brand reputations, and violence. Hence, the severity of the threat of fake news is increasing. The danger for fake news exists everywhere globally and is not specific to one language or nation. The creators of fake news layer the facts in the news with misinformation to confuse the readers. Hence, a need arises for creating a model for detecting fake news in multiple languages. This paper proposes a unified attention-based model Mul-FaD to detect fake news in various languages. We have created our dataset with around 40000 articles in English, German, and French. This paper also shows an exploratory analysis of the dataset created. In this paper, we perform experiments from a multilingual perspective in which we use an altered hierarchical attention-based network to detect fake news. Our model is able to achieve an accuracy of 93.73 and an F1 score of 92.9 for the combined corpus of the three languages.

Exploring the role of English in meritocracy in multilingual Indonesia: teacher beliefs, language use, and Global Englishes

ABSTRACT English features prominently in global communication as part of the knowledge economy in Indonesia and worldwide. Meritocracy represents a key concept within the rhetoric of this economy, as it promises that how well people do in life is not determined by external matters, but mostly by how hard they try. Included here is how hard they study English, and how well they perform on measures of English proficiency. No previous research has, however, considered English teachers' beliefs about the role of English in meritocracy. This is perhaps surprising given that the literature has increasingly highlighted the role of teachers as changemakers. To explore this issue, the present study considered the views of 260 English teachers in Indonesia. Findings revealed statistically significant correlations between teachers' beliefs in meritocracy for their own careers and for their students, on the one hand, and their views of English as a tool for success, on the other hand. This study not only makes an empirical contribution to the limited literature on the role of meritocracy in language education, but also advances conversation on language education from a multilingual and multicultural perspective by addressing the limits of meritocracy through Global Englishes with a translanguaging orientation.

From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: multilingual and multicultural perspectives

Article From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: multilingual and multicultural perspectives was published on November 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of Politeness Research (volume 0, issue 0).

Reconceptualizing literacy for a new Australia

This article discusses ideas for a new literacy compact in Australia that would encompass multilingual, language revitalizing, and Indigenous grounded perspectives. A key question posed is whether a uniquely Australian literacy order can be imagined, one that would extend the historically inherited tradition of Western grammar–centred practices as conventionally typified in print-based English book and letter reading and its digital equivalents, to include the many languages of the nation and their distinctive literacies, whether Indigenous and immigrant in origin. Any such imagining must understand the inherited and dominant tradition it seeks to change, the colonial legacy of damaged language vitality, and the various revitalization practices underway, and therefore must be situated in the concrete circumstances of contemporary communication issues. This means more than merely teaching non-dominant languages and literacies, but re-conceiving what the national project of “becoming literate” is taken to be, incorporating multiple perspectives, interests, and circumstances. This re-imagining would tie literacy outcomes not just to academic curriculums and assessment purposes, but also to health and wellbeing of populations, to regenerative cultural vitality, and to linguistic human rights. Such aims represent a challenge to current Closing the Gap policy, which is based principally on ameliorating group comparisons of reading performance. The article argues that public discussion about literacy should be able to comprehend such different activities in a coherent and overarching literacy endeavour to grasp the opportunity represented by contemporary social movements calling for a reconstruction of Australian national identity and direction. None of this should lose sight of the need to improve reading acquisition nor deflect from how what counts as literacy is itself being transformed in response to new economic and technological developments as discussed by Farrell, Newman, and Corbel (Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 42 (6):898–912, 2020).

Global Englishes and translanguaging in textbook design and curriculum development for universities in the Greater Bay Area of China

The development of English as a global language has urged the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to implement some reforms in relation to textbook design and curriculum development as well as the approaches to and goals of English language teaching (ELT). From the multilingual perspective, Global Englishes (GE) and translanguaging have both challenged the traditional native-oriented goal of ELT. Based on the level of language policy planning in the multilingual Greater Bay Area of China, this paper addresses the need to incorporate GE and translanguaging into textbook design and curriculum development. Referring to Byram’s framework of cultural content in textbooks, and to the GE proposal of exposure of multilingualism/multiculturalism and respect of diverse culture and identity in ELT, the paper further reports a case study to analyse the cultural content of the textbook, Speaking Critically: Intercultural Conversation. The paper also explores university students’ attitudes towards the integration of Chinese local culture into textbooks. The paper ends by addressing some challenges associated with translating GE and translanguaging into textbook design and curriculum development, and it provides further implications of such a proposal.