Conceptualizing Translanguaging Theory/Practice Juntos

Abstract

This chapter discusses the history of the development of translanguaging theory/practice. It tells of our struggle to reconcile the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic theories about bilingualism and language education that we were taught with the practices we observed in the Latinx bilingual community in which we lived and worked. The chapter describes how our theoretical understandings started to shift as we witnessed the educational and personal failures endured by students in the Latinx community and other bilingual minoritized communities, failures produced in part by practices inspired by those theories. We highlight the important role that the CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals) team has played in jointly developing translanguaging theory/practice juntos. Translanguaging theory/practice, seen as a single whole, aims to capture the actual languaging of minoritized communities and to develop pedagogical practices responsive to it. Translanguaging includes understandings generated by those who have suffered the indignities of coloniality and global capitalism, and it is not limited to ideas reflective of the languaging of the powerful. The chapter ends by presenting the challenges of inserting a different vision of language, and of bilingualism and language education, into school systems that inevitably serve the needs of nation states rooted in ideologies that support the control and domination of their citizens.

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