Negotiating the translanguaging instinct: Unpacking a transnational emergent multilingual student’s linguistic choices across time and space

Abstract

This paper explores how one transnational emergent multilingual (TEM) adolescent described her languaging practices across the spaces she navigated daily both within and outside of the classroom across her first year in the US Findings illustrate how this adolescent – a home language speaker of Spanish and Quiché and emergent speaker of English – engaged in languaging practices in ways that illustrated the deep connection between language and identity while also representing how she had been socialized to understand language as both a tool for communication and relationship-building and a way of showcasing – or concealing – her identity. Using translanguaging theory, specifically conceptualizations of the translanguaging instinct and translanguaging spaces, this paper illustrates how monoglossic ideologies operate in ways that can overpower students’ existing heteroglossic ideologies causing them to question their translanguaging instincts and abilities. Findings indicate the need to focus on the creation of translanguaging spaces that cultivate and nurture students’ translanguaging instinct by pushing back on larger monoglossic ideologies and language policies that dictate both school and community spaces that TEMs navigate.

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