Recently there has been a paradigm shift; languages are no longer viewed from a static monolingual perspective as named, bounded entities. Instead, translanguaging, which radically subverts assumptions about how people language, has emerged as an alternative. This shift has occurred across multiple fields including Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and Multilingual Education (Lewis, Jones, & Baker, 2012). Several theories of translanguaging in education have emerged: Translanguaging (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017; García & Wei, 2014), Codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2013), Flexible Bilingual Education (Weber, 2014), Heteroglossia (Blackledge, Creese, & Kaur Takhi, 2014) and more. Translanguaging perspectives offer richer, dynamic accounts of how people use their linguistic repertoires. When applied to education, the opportunities are vast, particularly for marginalised students. This paper offers a meta-analysis of the above-mentioned theories’ similarities, and crucial issues of terminology and ideology, implementation and assessment they face.
This meta-analysis spans 39 years of material to investigate Translanguaging principles, issues, strategies, and benefits. Consequently, a new model— Holistic Pedagogical Translanguaging Theory (HPPT)— is proposed. HPPT encompasses crucial Translanguaging theories and, from the meta-analysis, identifies six key features of these. The key features are: 1. Use of student’s full linguistic repertoire, 2. centripetal and centrifugal forces, 3. a cross-disciplinary and transcultural focus, 4. languaging flexibly as an end goal, 5. multimodality, and 6. a social justice and political focus. Several practical responses to issues of implementation and assessment of translanguaging curricula are also posited.
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Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2017). Minority languages and sustainable translanguaging: threat or opportunity? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1-12. doi:10.1080/01434632.2017.1284855
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