Plugging in translanguaging: thinking across theory for methodological innovation in English learner and multilingual education

Abstract

A translanguaging lens in educational research focuses on social, cultural, and power dynamics of language and multilingualism in practice. It also represents a potentially transformative pedagogical practice that centers the languaging practice, power, and agency of multilingual learners to transgress classroom language borders. However, translanguaging research that focuses on only the social aspects of classroom languaging can be subject to critique for failing to disrupt material inequities related to language and power in the classroom. This conceptual paper explores how thinking across multiple frameworks can generate innovative methodological approaches to knowledge production for translanguaging inquiry in the context of EL and multilingual education. Exploring how translanguaging can be plugged into Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism, Foucault’s Discourse, and Barad’s Agential Realism, this paper thinks within and against these frameworks to highlight important analytic provocations for now only how translanguaging relations emerge, but also what methodological territory is claimed in the process. A central concern of this paper is the methodological implications of posthumanist theories to develop material-discursive translanguaging inquiry.

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