Translanguaging

Language, Bilingualism and Education

O. Garcia,L. Wei

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137385765
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Winner of the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize 2015
This book addresses how the new linguistic concept of 'Translanguaging' has contributed to our understandings of language, bilingualism and education, with potential to transform not only semiotic systems and speaker subjectivities, but also social structures.

Part I

Language and Translanguaging

1

Language, Languaging and Bilingualism

Abstract: This first chapter explores the shifts that have recently taken place as traditional understandings of language and bilingualism are transformed. After reflecting on views of language, the chapter introduces the concept of languaging, and follows its emergence among scholars and as it has developed in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic literature. The chapter then reviews traditional concepts of bilingualism, multilingualism and plurilingualism as they have been studied from monolingual perspectives that view them only as double- or many-monolingualisms. It then reviews more dynamic views of these phenomena, arguing that to capture this complexity more is needed than the term languaging. It proposes translanguaging as a way to capture the fluid language practices of bilinguals without giving up the social construction of language and bilingualism under which speakers operate.

Keywords: bilingualism; languaging; multilingualism; plurilingualism; psycholinguistics; sociolinguistics; translanguaging

García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137385765.

Reflecting on language

To most people, language is what we speak, hear, read or write in everyday life. And we speak, hear, read and write in what are considered different languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Urdu. In the theoretical discipline of Linguistics, however, tensions and controversies abound as to how language is conceptualized. One of the founding fathers of modern linguistics, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, famously described language as a system of signs. Moreover, linguistic signs are arbitrary, that is, a linguistic sign is an association between a sound image and a concept, and the sound-meaning association is established by arbitrary convention for each language. This conventionality accounts for the diversity of languages. Following this line of argument, for example, early 20th-century structural linguists demonstrated how, historically, cultural assumptions informed the development of such structures as word orders, gender morphologies and event reporting in different languages.

Saussure’s ideas of signs and the relationship between the signifier and the signified gave rise to the field of semiotics, the study of signs and sign processes, and the acknowledgment of the social dimensions of language. But within Linguistics, his insistence that language could be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension, and in particular, his distinction between langue, the abstract rules and conventions of a signifying system independent of individual users on the one hand, and parole, the concrete instances of the use of langue by individuals in a series of speech acts on the other, led to the divergence of interests in two very different directions. One trend pursued universal structures across human languages; the other followed how human beings put to use their linguistic knowledge in real-life contexts.

Noam Chomsky refashioned the langue versus parole distinction in terms of competence versus performance, the former referring to the tacit knowledge of the language system and the latter, the use of language in concrete situations. For Chomsky, Linguistics should be concerned with what all languages have in common, what he called Universal Grammar (UG). Yet, the goal of the UG enterprise is to abstract away from the diversity, the details and the plurality of human languages. In fact, Chomsky (1995: 54) suggests that the main task of linguistic theory ‘is to show that the ... diversity of linguistic phenomena is illusory’. There is an inherent problem with Chomsky’s logic, as Burton-Roberts (2004) points out. That is, if UG is supposed to be about all languages as Chomsky seems to want it to be, then it cannot be conceptualized as a natural, biological, genetic endowment, as particular languages, as we know them (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish), are historically evolved social conventions; and if UG is about something entirely natural, biological or genetic, then it cannot be a theory of actual languages that human beings use in society. But the main issue we have with Chomsky’s line of inquiry is that he sets the discipline of Linguistics against the reality of linguistic diversity, a historical fact that has been further enhanced by the globalization of contemporary society.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of heteroglossia in the early 20th century challenged the structuralist conception of language by Saussure and the strictly mentalist conception of Chomsky, both of whom removed language from context of use. Bakhtin posited that language is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists and is incapable of neutrality because it emerges from the actions of speakers with certain perspective and ideological positioning. To make an utterance, says Bakhtin, means to take language over, ‘shot through with intentions and accents’ (as cited in Morris, 1994: 293). Another close associate of Bakhtin after the Russian revolution was Valentin Nikolaevic Vološinov, a Marxist philosopher of language, who strongly supported Bakhtin’s dialogic position on language. Language, Vološinov says, acquires life ‘in concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic system of language forms, nor in the individual psyche of speakers’ (1929/1973: 95). A shift was occurring that led to the coining of the term ‘languaging’.

The emergence of languaging

Perhaps the first scholars to talk about ‘languaging’ were not linguists but the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela who in 1973 posited their theory of autopoeisis. Autopoeisis argues that we cannot separate our biological and social history of actions from the ways in which we perceive the world. Our experience, Maturana and Varela say, is moored to our structure in a binding way, and the processes involved in our makeup, in our actions as human beings, constitute our knowledge. What is known is brought forth through action and practice, and is not simply based on acquiring the relevant features of a pre-given world that can be decomposed into significant fragments. As Maturana and Varela (1998: 26) say: ‘All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing’. Their autopoeisis view of biological life leads to their observations about language:

It is by languaging that the act of knowing, in the behavioral coordination which is language, brings forth a world. We work out our lives in a mutual linguistic coupling, not because language permits us to reveal ourselves but because we are constituted in language in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with others. (1998: 234–235, italics added)

Language is not a simple system of structures that is independent of human actions with others, of our being with others. The term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becoming of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world.

Another scholar who early on used the term ‘languaging’ was A. L. Becker. Writing about translation, Becker (1988) further posited that language is not simply a code or a system of rules or structures; rather what he calls languaging shapes our experiences, stores them, retrieves them and communicates them in an open-ended process. Languaging both shapes and is shaped by context. Becker (1995) explains: ‘All languaging is what in Java is called jarwa dhosok, taking old language (jarwa) and pushing (dhosok) it into new contexts’ (185). For Becker, language can never be accomplished; and thus languaging is a better term to capture an ongoing process that is always being created as we interact with the world lingually. To learn a new way of languaging is not just to learn a new code, Becker says, it is to enter another history of interactions and cultural practices and to learn ‘a new way of being in the world’ (1995: 227). In appealing to the concept of languaging, Becker is shaping what he calls ‘a linguistics of particularity’ (1988: 21) within the Humanities.

Using Becker’s definition of languaging, the Argentinean semiotician Walter Mignolo (2000) reminds us that language is not a fact, a system of syntactic, semantic and phonetic rules. Rather, Mignolo says, languaging is ‘thinking and writing between languages’ and ‘speech and writing are strategies for orienting and manipulating social domains of interaction’ (226). Mignolo’s reference to ‘manipulation’ reminds us that all languaging is enmeshed in systems of power, and thus, can be oppressive or liberating, depending on the positioning of speakers and their agency.

Languaging, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics

New patterns of global activity characterized by intensive flows of people, capital goods and discourses have been experienced since the late 20th century. These have been driven by new technologies, as well as by a neoliberal economy that with its emphasis on the marketization of life has destabilized old social and economic structures and produced new forms of global inequalities. With interactions increasingly occurring in what Mary Louise Pratt (1991) refers to as ‘contact zones’ (often virtual ones) between speakers of different origins, experiences and characteristics, language is less and less understood as a monolithic autonomous system made up of discrete structures (as in Saussure) or a context-free mental grammar (as in Chomsky). We have entered ‘a new way of being in the world’ (Becker, 1995: 227), a world with Other spaces that are neither here nor there in a heterotopia as Foucault (1986) has called them.

With the rise of post-structuralism in the post-modern era, language has begun to be conceptualized as a series of social practices and actions by speakers that are embedded in a web of social and cognitive relations. Furthermore, a critique of nation-state/colonial language ideologies has emerged, seeking to excavate subaltern knowledge (Canagarajah, 2005; Flores, 2012, 2013; Makoni and Makoni, 2010; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Mignolo, 2000; Pennycook, 2010; Rosa, 2010). Post-structuralist critical language scholars treat language as contested space – as tools that are re-appropriated by actual language users. Ultimately, the goal of these critiques is to break out of static conceptions of language that keep power in the hands of the few, thus embracing the fluid nature of actual and local language practices of all speakers (Flores, 2013; Flores and García, 2013). The focus on language practices of language users has been signaled by the adoption of the term languaging by many sociolinguists (Canagarajah, 2007; Jørgensen and Juffermans, 2011; Juffermans, 2011; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Møller and Jørgensen, 2009; Shohamy, 2006), emphasizing the agency of speakers in an ongoing process of interactive meaning-making.

These new ways of being in the world have produced alternative understandings of the sociolinguistics of globalization; languages are mobile resources or practices within social, cultural, political and historical contexts (Blommaert, 2010). Languages are seen by post-structuralist sociolinguists as ‘a product of the deeply social and cultural activities in which people engage’ (Pennycook, 2010: 1) with meanings created through ideological systems situated within historical moments (Foucault, 1972). Pennycook (2010) adds: ‘To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity’ (2). That is, language is seen neither as a system of structures nor a product located in the mind of speaker. What we have is languaging, ‘a social process constantly reconstructed in sensitivity to environmental factors’ (Canagarajah, 2007: 94). Shohamy (2006) uses the term ‘languaging’ to refer to ‘language as an integral and natural component of interaction, communication and construction of meaning’ (2). We are all languagers who use semiotic resources at our disposal in strategic ways to communicate and act in the world, but which are recognized by the bilingual speaker, as well as by others, as belonging to two sets of socially constructed ‘languages’. Thus, Jørgensen and Juffermans (2011) refer to the human turn in sociolinguistics, by which the traditional Fishmanian question ‘who speaks (or writes) what language (or what language variety) to whom, when and to what end’ becomes ‘who languages how and what is being languaged under what circumstances in a particular place and time’ (Juffermans, 2011: 165). The human turn in sociolinguistics, Juffermans argues, is ‘toward language (in singular or as a verb) as a sociolinguistic system that is constructed and inhabited by people’ (165).

As sociolinguists have become more interested in the cognitive side of language practices, psycholinguists are also considering the social aspects of cognitive engagement (e.g. see studies in Cook and Bassetti, 2011; Javier, 2007; Pavlenko, 2006). Thus, post-structuralist psycholinguists have also referred to languaging as ‘a process of using language to gain knowledge, to make sense, to articulate one’s thought and to communicate about using language’ (Li Wei, 2011b: 1224). That is, the focus is on the speaker’s creative and critical use of linguistic resources to mediate cognitively complex activities (Swain and Deters, 2007). As Swain has said, languaging ‘serves as a vehicle through which thinking is articulated and transformed into an artifactual form’ (Swain, 2000: 97). This is consistent with Cook’s notion of multicompetence (Cook, 2012; Cook and Li Wei, forthcoming), which focuses on the intertwining of language and cognition: multicompetence is not confined to the language aspects of the mind but is also linked to cognitive processes and concepts. This means, on the one hand, not putting barriers between language and other cognitive systems, and on the other, denying the no-language position that language is simply an artifact of other cognitive processes. Extending Maturana and Varela (1973), all languaging is knowing and doing, and all knowing and doing is languaging.

One of the differences between the orientations of post-structuralist sociolinguists and psycholinguists with regards to languaging is that whereas sociolinguists focus on the context of use of languaging, psycholinguists look at languaging as the property of individuals, not situations; although recently Cook, for instance, has extended his notion of multicompetence to communities as well (see, e.g. Cook, 2012; also Brutt-Griffler, 2002). Regardless of the difference, the emphasis on languaging today by both sociolinguists and psycholinguists extends our traditional understandings of languages. The next section discusses bilingualism and related phenomena, while starting to ponder how languaging further impacts our understandings of bilingualism.

Bilingualism, multilingualism, plurilingualism

It was the Saussurean vision of language as a self-contained system of structures that permeated the vision of language in early studies of bilingualism. Haugen (1956) gave an early definition of the term bilingual: ‘Bilingual is a cover term for people with a number of different language skills, having in common only that they are not monolingual ... . [A] bilingual ... is one who knows two languages, but will here be used to include also the one who knows more than two, variously known as a plurilingual, a multilingual, or a polyglot’ (9). Uriel Weinreich (1974) provided a similar definition: ‘The practice of alternately using two languages will be called bilingualism, and the persons involved, bilingual’ (1). Bilingual has thus come to mean knowing and using two autonomous languages. The term multilingual is often used to mean knowing and using more than two languages. The Council of Europe has proposed that the term plurilingual be reserved for the individual’s ‘ability to use several languages to varying degrees and for distinct purposes’ (2000: 168), whereas the term multilingual be used only in relationship to the many languages of societal group...