THE VHS TAPES waited inside a small pull-out cabinet. Thin adhesive panels on the cabinet’s sides gave the chipboardthe appearance of polished, solid wood. The heavy inner drawer rolled smoothly on its track to reveal the row of tapes,each with a hand-lettered label—some in my mother’s careful italics but many in the large block letters of my father’shand. As a long-haul truck driver in the pre-GPS early ’90s, my father was responsible for manually logging his trips inan oversize ledger when he got home. Those block letters spelled out maps like secret codes: I-77 S PICK UP, 460 E, I 77But his writing on these tapes looked very different:N DETROIT. FRANKENSTEIN. DRACULA. THE MUMMY. THEWOLF MAN.

If studentsare too comfortable using their preferred languagein class, will the desire to become English-fluentdecline?

there are not enough bilingualteachers (yet) to offer dual language instruc-tion

Teachers are inviting students to usetheir home languages to talk to their classmates,to do drafts of their writing, to journal to theirparents, and, if the teacher is fluent and everyoneelse in the class is bilingual, to explain things inanother language in the classroom.

Why should theybe consigned to foreign language classes thatleave them with little to show when they couldbe bilingual and biliterate before high school,like most of the rest of the world?

Spanish in Illinois isthriving!

Translanguaging goes beyond these antecedents,however, to add something new and importantto American education. Li Wei and Ofelia García(2022) call translanguaging a “decolonializingproject” (p. 313), and many other researchers andpractitioners raise the issues of language justiceand social hierarchy

The concept that all of these words are partof your identity is completely consistent withlinguist Noam Chomsky’s (1968) core conceptof Universal Grammar in which language-mak-ing is universal and hard-wired in all humans.

Translanguaging callsfor “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguis-tic repertoire” (Oteguy et al., 2015, p. 281; seealso Chalmers, 2016; García & Wei, 2014). Inother words, you have the right—and delight—to employ all of the words and gestures you’vegot.

African-American teachers I teach oftenexpress that they need to code switch in white-dominant settings and describe it as confusingand stressful, although it is a skill they say theymust acquire and exercise.

The difference might be that code switching isconsidered a more “local” act whereas translan-guaging is considered the cognitive underpin-ning of many speech acts (Wei, 2018).

thedeficit is not in the person but in the language!

Looking for“the right word” or phrase may bring to minda word from another language familiar to theothers in the room.

diglossia reached its peak in 1993, according toGoogle Ngram, and has declined rapidly sincethen, probably in inverse relation to the rise ofthe term translanguage.

(1) diglossia and (2) code switching.

the poor wishful learner is always aspiring, butnever quite able, to reach the level of any nativespeaker

we putlearners under huge headphones in a languagelab to endlessly mimic a (very unnatural sound-ing) man’s stilted sentences.

there was almost a fetishistic focuson perfection and correctness

peda-gogy

“If youwant to really hurt me, talk badly about my lan-guage. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguisticidentity—I am my language”

If my language is banned, mocked, and lookeddown upon, what does that say about my valueas a person?

Even now, in the post-colonial system rightto the present day, many students are requiredto “leave their home language at the classroomdoor.” What could be more soul-destroying thannot having the opportunity to become literate inone’s own home language?

Many post-colonial free nations have removedthe European languages in favor of their ownnational languages, although the colonial lan-guages can be handy as lingua francas across dif-ferent regions and countries and in nongovern-mental organizations.

The Welsh havekeenly felt the suppression of their language bytheir English colonizers for centuries

The term was first coined by Welsh educator CenWilliams in 1994, in an article he wrote in Welshand then translated to English about ways to useboth languages in the classroom.

Wei and García(2022) note that there were 23,000 mentionsof translanguaging in a March 2022 GoogleScholar search (p. 314).

The Google NgramViewer (2024b), which searches a vast naturallanguage database to track how often a word orphrase is used over time, shows that as recentlyas 1980, the words translanguage and translan-guaging appeared 0% of the time, even with 10decimals after them! However, by 2019, trans-languaging had exploded to .241354, with onlyfive zeroes in front of it!

to this influ-ential concept (“old wine”), predicts how thismovement may affect your education setting(“new bottle”)

antecedents

translanguaging

If studentsare too comfortable using their preferred languagein class, will the desire to become English-fluentdecline?

there are not enough bilingualteachers (yet) to offer dual language instruc-tion

Teachers are inviting students to usetheir home languages to talk to their classmates,to do drafts of their writing, to journal to theirparents, and, if the teacher is fluent and everyoneelse in the class is bilingual, to explain things inanother language in the classroom.

Why should theybe consigned to foreign language classes thatleave them with little to show when they couldbe bilingual and biliterate before high school,like most of the rest of the world?

Spanish in Illinois isthriving!

Translanguaging goes beyond these antecedents,however, to add something new and importantto American education. Li Wei and Ofelia García(2022) call translanguaging a “decolonializingproject” (p. 313), and many other researchers andpractitioners raise the issues of language justiceand social hierarchy

The concept that all of these words are partof your identity is completely consistent withlinguist Noam Chomsky’s (1968) core conceptof Universal Grammar in which language-mak-ing is universal and hard-wired in all humans.

Translanguaging callsfor “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguis-tic repertoire” (Oteguy et al., 2015, p. 281; seealso Chalmers, 2016; García & Wei, 2014). Inother words, you have the right—and delight—to employ all of the words and gestures you’vegot.

African-American teachers I teach oftenexpress that they need to code switch in white-dominant settings and describe it as confusingand stressful, although it is a skill they say theymust acquire and exercise.

The difference might be that code switching isconsidered a more “local” act whereas translan-guaging is considered the cognitive underpin-ning of many speech acts (Wei, 2018).

thedeficit is not in the person but in the language!

Looking for“the right word” or phrase may bring to minda word from another language familiar to theothers in the room.

diglossia reached its peak in 1993, according toGoogle Ngram, and has declined rapidly sincethen, probably in inverse relation to the rise ofthe term translanguage.

(1) diglossia and (2) code switching.

the poor wishful learner is always aspiring, butnever quite able, to reach the level of any nativespeaker

we putlearners under huge headphones in a languagelab to endlessly mimic a (very unnatural sound-ing) man’s stilted sentences

there was almost a fetishistic focuson perfection and correctness

peda-gogy

“If youwant to really hurt me, talk badly about my lan-guage. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguisticidentity—I am my language”

If my language is banned, mocked, and lookeddown upon, what does that say about my valueas a person?

Even now, in the post-colonial system rightto the present day, many students are requiredto “leave their home language at the classroomdoor.” What could be more soul-destroying thannot having the opportunity to become literate inone’s own home language?

Many post-colonial free nations have removedthe European languages in favor of their ownnational languages, although the colonial lan-guages can be handy as lingua francas across dif-ferent regions and countries and in nongovern-mental organizations.

The Welsh havekeenly felt the suppression of their language bytheir English colonizers for centuries,

The term was first coined by Welsh educator CenWilliams in 1994, in an article he wrote in Welshand then translated to English about ways to useboth languages in the classroom.

Wei and García(2022) note that there were 23,000 mentionsof translanguaging in a March 2022 GoogleScholar search (p. 314).

The Google NgramViewer (2024b), which searches a vast naturallanguage database to track how often a word orphrase is used over time, shows that as recentlyas 1980, the words translanguage and translan-guaging appeared 0% of the time, even with 10decimals after them! However, by 2019, trans-languaging had exploded to .241354, with onlyfive zeroes in front of it!

translanguaging

to this influ-ential concept (“old wine”), predicts how thismovement may affect your education setting(“new bottle”)

antecedents