The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education

Sara Laviosa, Maria González-Davies, Sara Laviosa, Maria González-Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032474915
  9780815368434
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000740349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education

will present the state of the art of the place and role of translation in educational contexts worldwide. It lays a sound foundation for the future interdisciplinary cooperation between Translation Studies and Educational Linguistics.

By adopting a transdisciplinary perspective, the handbook will bring together the various fields of scholarly enquiry and practice that make a valuable contribution to enlarging the notion of translation and diversifying its uses in education. Each contribution provides an overview of the historical background to a given educational setting. Focusing on current research approaches and empirical findings, this volume outlines the development of pedagogical approaches, methods, assessment and curriculum design. The handbook also examines examples of pedagogies that integrate translation in the curriculum, the teaching method's approach, design and procedure as well as assessment.

Based on a multilingual and applied-oriented approach, the handbook is essential reading for postgraduate students, researchers and advanced undergraduate students of Translation Studies, and educationalists and educators in the 21st century post-global era.

Chapters 4, 25, and 26 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Theoretical foundations

1
Bilingualism and multilingualism

Katie A. Bernstein and Laura Hamman-Ortiz

Introduction

Bi/multilingualism is the phenomenon of using more than one language. While some researchers treat bi/multilingualism as something marked and remarkable, in reality, much of the world is bi/multilingual. In the European Union, for example, 54% of people report being able to hold a conversation in at least one other language (European Commission 2015). Researchers estimate that the same is true for over half of the world (Grosjean 2010).

People become bi/multilingual in a variety of contexts – homes, schools, jobs, communities – and on a variety of timelines – some from birth (simultaneous bilinguals), others in childhood, as adolescents, or as adults (sequential bilinguals). People also become bi/multilingual to varying degrees, as needed for their context(s) of use. Despite the folk definition of bilingualism as the union of two perfect monolinguals, multilingual people often have different kinds of expertise in each of their languages. They often use their languages for different purposes, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in combination, as they encounter others with linguistic repertoires that overlap with parts of theirs (Rymes 2014).

As Valdés (n.d.) points out, the utility of categorizing bi/multilinguals by when, where, or how they learned and use their languages really depends on the question a researcher is asking. For our purposes here, bi/multilinguals are “those who use two or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives” (Grosjean 2010, p. 4), regardless of where, when, and how they learned and use those languages.

In addition to examining bi/multilingualism from an individual perspective, it is also possible to examine the ways in which societies are bi/multilingual. From a societal perspective, researchers have studied the functions of societal languages, their statuses (both official and unofficial), their relationships to groups of speakers, and their relationships to power. In this chapter, we primarily focus on individual bi/multilingualism, but address some of the research on societal bi/multilingualism as well. We begin with an overview of historical perspectives on bi/multilingualism, then turn to current issues in research, followed by approaches to bi/multilingual education. We conclude with new directions in the study of bi/multilingualism.

Historical perspectives

Bi/multilingualism has existed in some form or another in every human society since the earliest civilizations (Baker and Wright 2017). The study of bi/multilingualism, however, emerged as a formal area of inquiry in tandem with the construction of the monolingual nation state in 19th–20th-century Europe (Baker and Lewis 2015; Gramling 2016). At that time, linguistic heterogeneity was perceived to be an impediment to the aims of the nation. National languages were framed as markers of unity, and their use was encouraged, incentivized, and in some cases, mandated (Irvine and Gal 2000; Gal 2006). Colonization spread these language ideologies throughout the world and, in spite of the multilingual reality of most human societies, normalized monolingualism for the national subject (Flores 2013). Ironically, this “invention” of monolingualism (Gramling 2016) and of the “native” speaker enabled the framing of bi/multilingualism as marked and therefore worthy of study.

These perspectives have had a lasting impact on how bi/multilingualism is understood, contributing to a tradition of language research that views language as separate from speakers and from contexts of use. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), often called the father of modern linguistics, distinguished between language use (parole) and the linguistic system (langue), declaring parole too unruly for study and, instead, sought to identify stable patterns and structures of langue. Based on his work, structuralist theories dominated linguistics for the next half century. For instance, Chomsky (1965), another foundational figure in the field of linguistics, framed language as a system of abstract structures in the mind of “an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community” (p. 3). Within this framework, bilingualism could not be seen as anything but the mastery of two (or more) separate systems.

In the last few decades, however, the study of bi/multilingualism has embraced a series of transdisciplinary turns. The social turn (Block 2003) and the practice turn (Schatzki 2001) marked shifts in the field toward understanding language as inseparable from specific speakers, situated contexts, and relations of power (Bakhtin 1981; Heller 2007). The multilingual turn (May 2013) marked a move away from studying multilingualism from a monolingual perspective, instead viewing the use of multiple languages as authentic bi/multilingual practice. Most recently, the trans- turn (Hawkins and Mori 2018) has meant a “softening of boundaries between languages” (Cenoz and Gorter 2013, p. 594) and even the more radical “disinventing” of languages (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). This conceptual shift has facilitated the theorizing of the fluid language practices of bi/multilinguals as translanguaging (García 2009; Wei 2018), translingual practice (Canagarajah 2013), polylingual languaging (Jørgensen 2008), and metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). Common across these terms is an acknowledgement of the hybrid and dynamic ways that bi/multilingual individuals leverage their linguistic repertoires to communicate across multiple communities (García and Li Wei 2014). Thus, while many policies and ideologies around the globe continue to promote monoglossic framings of language – at times even weaponizing monolingualism as part of nativist rhetoric – for those who study language, there has been a shift in how bi/multilingualism is understood.

Research approaches and key findings

Research on bi/multilingualism is vast and increasingly interdisciplinary. While recognizing the overlap among approaches, we frame our review around three broad areas of scholarship: psychological approaches, linguistic approaches, and anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches.

Insights from psychology: bilingualism and the mind

Psychological and psycholinguistic approaches to studying bilingualism focus primarily on the relationship between bilingualism and cognition. Early scholarship (1900–1950) linked bilingualism to “language handicap” or “mental confusion” and cautioned against exposing young children to more than one language (Yoshioka 1929; Smith 1931, 1939). Other research during this era drew correlations between bilingualism and low intelligence (Goodenough 1926; see Hakuta 1986 for a review). Much of this early research, however, suffered from serious methodological issues. For instance, Goodenough (1926) used English-language IQ tests as the central measure of intelligence and compared the scores of recently arrived immigrants and monolingual US citizens, while ignoring the immigrants’ English proficiency or the test’s reliance on US cultural knowledge (e.g. “Why should a married man have his life insured?” [Alpha Test 3, Question 13, in Hakuta 1986]).

Much research today focuses instead on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism (Baker and Wright 2017). Peal and Lambert’s (1962) study of 110 middle-class, bilingual and monolingual Canadian elementary students, for example, found that bilingual students demonstrated more abstract thinking, better mental flexibility, and higher verbal IQ scores. While the study had methodological weaknesses (e.g. small sample size, focus on middle-class students, ignoring some home and environmental factors), it marked a turning point in cognitive studies of bilingualism. Recent meta-analyses highlight many cognitive benefits that are now associated with bilingualism, such as increases in working memory and metalinguistic awareness and improved attention and executive control (Bialystok 2005, 2009; Adesope et al. 2010). Other research has found that bilinguals demonstrate more divergent or creative thinking (Ricciardelli 1992; Leikin 2013; Kharkhurin 2015) and are more adept at solving complex problems in mathematics and science (Kessler and Quinn 1982; McLeay 2003).

When contemporary scholarship has identified a monolingual advantage, it is often the result of monolingual measurement. For example, bilingual children have been found to have a smaller vocabulary in a given (single) language when compared to that of their monolingual peers, and bilingual adults perform worse than monolinguals on tasks involving rapid lexical retrieval, or naming as many words as possible within a given time frame and category (Bialystok 2009). However, it is important to note that these differences are often statistically significant rather than clinically significant – meaning they do not create noticeable practical effects – and that these studies assess in only one language, which does not account for vocabulary knowledge distributed across languages (Umbel et al. 1992; Pearson 1998).

In addition to questions of assessment, research on cognitive differences between monolinguals and bilinguals must also account for factors such as socio-economic status, which affects performance on vocabulary assessments for both monolinguals and bilinguals (Umbel et al. 1992). Moreover, speakers’ degree of bilingualism can affect outcomes (Thomas-Sunesson et al. 2018) and make it difficult to assign speakers to categorical groups, like “bilingual” and “monolingual” (Luk and Bialystok 2013).

Insights from linguistics: the language practices of bi/multilingual individuals

Research from linguistics and related fields (e.g. second language acquisition, applied linguistics, educational linguistics) primarily explores the language features, practices, and learning of bi/multilingual individuals. While early scholarship drew from structuralist understandings of bi/multilingualism – considering languages as isolated objects of study – in the 1970s, scholars interested in bi/multilingualism began to focus on the social and pragmatic functions of language. One area of scholarship that emerged during this time explored code-switching, or the alternation of two or more languages within the same utterance (intrasentential code-switching) or between utterances (intersentential code-switching; see MacSwan 2013 for a comprehensive review). Some scholars have examined the formal and informal functions of code-switching, such as Blom and Gumperz’s (1972) study of dialects in a Norwegian fishing village. Others have sought to identify structural boundaries of code-switched speech. For example, Timm (1975) identified constraints on Spanish-English code-switching, distinguishing sentences that bilinguals considered well-formed (e.g. The students habian visto la pelicula italiana) from those considered ill-formed (e.g. *The student had visto la pelicula italiana). The substantive body of scholarship that followed (e.g. Poplack 1980; Myers-Scotton 1993; MacSwan 2000) convincingly demonstrated that code-switching, like other linguistic behaviour, is rule-governed. As contemporary linguistic scholarship has shifted toward poststructuralist understandings of language, researchers have begun to explore the flexible ways that bi/multilingual individuals use language beyond code-switching (Baker and Wright 2017). In particular, translanguaging – the “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds” (García 2009, p. 45) – has become a popular construct for research on bi/multilingualism. Research on translanguaging tends to focus on two central arguments: (1) translanguaging is an authentic communicative practice for bi/multilinguals (see the TLANG project, https://tlang.org.uk/) and (2) translanguaging has pedagogical affordances that can be leveraged to support student learning (e.g. Creese and Blackledge 2010; Palmer et al. 2014; Gort and Sembiante 2015).

Linguistic perspectives have also examined the relationship between language and identity. Bonny Norton is credited with bringing identity to the forefront of second language acquisition research, revealing the multiple sociological factors that shape a learner’s investment in acquiring a new language (Norton Pierce 1995; Norton 2013). Others have explored the intimate relationship between language and identity in relation to group membership (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), for example, found that individuals adopt linguistic behaviour to resemble the group...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a transdisciplinary perspective on translation and education
• Part I Theoretical foundations
• Part II Early childhood and primary education
• Part III Secondary school education
• Part IV Higher education
• Part V Special education
• Part VI Teacher education
• Index 451