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¿Qué es translanguaging? And what does it mean for bilingual education?

Translanguaging is the process by which bilingual students use their languages in conjunction and rather than keeping them separate. Dr. Ofelia García, a professor of Urban Education and of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, suggests that bilingual students should be able to translanguage in the classroom-that is, they should be able to use both of their languages to communicate what they know and can do.

Translanguaging happens fluidly in the classroom, but teachers can also support translanguaging by intentionally guiding students to use all of their linguistic abilities. For example, teachers can ask students to write stories with bilingual characters who use both of their languages. The intentionality behind this teaching practice is to provide a flexible and comfortable space for students to fully share what they know across all of their languages.

However, translanguaging is often not promoted within dual language education (DLE) programs. Many DLE programs emphasize strict language allocation policies that limit the use of the partner language during English time and vice versa.

And that is a limitation, as García and co-authors María Teresa (Maite) Sánchez and Cristian Solorza point out in an article published in the Bilingual Research Journal. They argue that DLE programs should support the use of translanguaging in the classroom and highlight the need for "language allocation that more coherently reflects the dynamic nature of bilingualism."

DLE programs compartmentalize and protect separate instruction in the partner language and English largely by design. Specifically, all DLE programs split language instruction based on time allocations. The 90/10 model starts in kindergarten and provides instruction in the partner language for 90 percent of the day and in English 10 percent of the day. Then the English language increases gradually until it reaches 50 percent at the upper elementary grade levels. The 50/50 model provides instruction equally in the partner language and English. These strict language allocation policies may limit opportunities for students, teachers, and administrators to use translanguaging practices in the classroom.

Sánchez, García and Solorza suggest that language allocation policies that offer more flexibility to incorporate translanguaging practices could work within existing DLE program models.

To that end, they propose that programs adopt a translanguaging allocation policy that includes three components:

1. Translanguaging documentation

2. Translanguaging rings

3. Translanguaging transformative spaces

The translanguaging documentation component provides teachers the opportunity to gather evidence that can be used to holistically assess students' linguistic abilities and academic development. Specifically through translanguaging documentation, teachers are able to assess and recognize the creative and dynamic ways their students are learning and applying language. This information can then be used by teachers to inform and modify classroom instruction.

Translanguaging rings are instructional strategies that help teachers build on students' home languages to enhance their learning experiences. This can include helping students understand how their languages are connected. For example, students can discuss the commonalities that exist between their home languages and English by identifying cognates or words that have similar spelling, pronunciation, and meaning (such as ciencia/science) during a reading lesson.

Finally, the creation of translanguaging transformative spaces allows students to be themselves and to speak the way they do outside of school. In these spaces, students' multilingual practices are recognized and celebrated. Importantly, students are also provided with the opportunity to critically question instances when their full language abilities have been constrained and delegitimized in their educational experiences. And this can be very eye-opening for them.

Rethinking language allocation in DLE programs that include more translanguaging practices will require administrators and teachers to shift not only their practice, but also their understanding around how languages work together to support students' learning. Program leaders and teachers must consider how to integrate translanguaging-regardless of the language allocation model they currently implement. Targeted professional development on translanguaging pedagogical practices is therefore needed for both school leaders and teachers.

Taken together, by elevating and validating the use of translanguaging within DLE classrooms, bilingual students are empowered to use all of their language abilities to support their learning.

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Bringing Translanguaging into Dual Language Education Programs

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¿Qué es translanguaging? And what does it mean for bilingual education? Translanguaging is the process by which bilingual students use their languages in conjunction and rather than keeping them separate.

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In the ECE program we give high importance to dual/multi language learners. We want to make sure that future teachers are aware of the importance of home language and how it supports the learning of any other language.

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Use these resources to support young children who are learning a second language while continuing to develop their home language.

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What Is This?

This is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud.

It makes it easy to actually hear how words are pronounced based on their phonetic spelling, without having to look up each character in the IPA chart and string the sounds together yourself.

For example, "budgerigar" (AKA the common parakeet) can be pronounced according to its IPA notation/ˈbʌdʒərɪɡɑːr/.

How Do You Use It?

Find a word you would like to hear pronounced, grab the IPA notation (if you don't already have it, Wiktionary is a great place to look), toss it in the form, and hit the "Read" button.

For example, /ˈpɪdʒən/ will be read as "pigeon."

How Does It Work?

I had fun making this, so I wrote about how it was built here!

Who Am I?

I'm nobody! Who are you?

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This is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud. It makes it easy to actually hear how words are pronounced based on their phonetic spelling, without having to look up each character in the IPA chart and string the sounds together yourself.

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When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯.

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When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯. https://t.co/cecwzkGMTO

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Graphic nicely illustrating how Korean and Japanese grammar are almost exactly the opposite of English grammar https://t.co/d7xe8B7Hky

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When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯. https://t.co/cecwzkGMTO
— 和也 (Kazuya) (@KazJESL) October 23, 2021

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When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯. https://t.co/cecwzkGMTO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
Graphic nicely illustrating how Korean and Japanese grammar are almost exactly the opposite of English grammar https://t.co/d7xe8B7Hky

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯. https://t.co/cecwzkGMTO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
When my students learn to read, I tell them to read backwards and they're like 🤯.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
Graphic nicely illustrating how Korean and Japanese grammar are almost exactly the opposite of English grammar https://t.co/d7xe8B7Hky

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CCERBAL Forum - The Racialized Somatic Norm in the ELT Workplace by V. Ramjattan

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Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity Research Group (BILD)

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JPB Gerald, our first guest blogger of 2022, is an EdD candidate at CUNY - Hunter College in Instructional Leadership, and a theorist seeking justice for the racially, linguistically, and neurologically minoritized. He identifies as Black and neurodivergent, though he spent most of his life unaware of the latter. He hosts a podcast called Unstandardized English, and has had his writing published in academic journals, practitioner magazines, and national newspapers. His first book, on the harm caused by the centering of whiteness in language education, will be published by Multilingual Matters in early 2023. He lives with his wife, young son, and dog in New York, on stolen Munsee Lenape and Canarsie territory.
Much research has been done into the way that raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) seep into how spoken accents are perceived. Workers who do not fit the visual image of the white native speaker are forced to perform the aesthetic labour of attempting to look and sound the right way (Ramjattan, 2019a; 2019b), while they are often doomed to be viewed as less valuable because of the bodies they inhabit, even if they would otherwise be categorized as a "native speaker" (Faez, 2012). Indeed, relying upon this native/non-native binary allows the fiction of supposedly inferior accents to persist, and there are a great deal of companies that prey upon the genuine fear and pain of potential clients. In this blog post, excerpted from a book to be released next year, I will look at the way a few of these companies market their offerings, in the hopes that I can demonstrate the deceit and the harm at the heart of the accent reduction industry. In researching this work, what I found was that not only was accent reduction expensive, but that it reveals the false premise on which it is built as soon as you look beneath the surface.

The iceberg of ignorance

If you visit the website for a company called "Accent Advisor," you will be told (as of Winter 2022) that there are three packages available for an individual to purchase. The "best value" is $18 per 25-minute lesson, with lessons three times a week, which is $54/week. The "most popular option" is $19.50 per 25-minute lesson, with lessons twice a week ($39/week). And the third option, called "Lite," is $24 per lesson, once a week. If you can't make up your mind, the single lesson has a sad van in the background, the middle option has an airplane, and the "best value" has a satellite, because your accent will be reduced... astronomically? (Accent Advisor, n.d.) It goes without saying that despite their assurances that these prices are affordable, only a small number of people can afford to pay $25-50 dollars a week over several months to "correct" what isn't actually a problem.

Consider, what are they actually offering their clients? Their tagline is, "We help people speak with an American accent." I'm sure it's not a Chicano accent or a Southern Black accent, despite those being American. "Speak Confidently," they promise. "Many foreigners have a wide variety of speaking patterns that seem strange to Americans. Our coaches can help you understand these potential areas of difficulty. You'll learn a wide variety of tones that help you put the right feelings behind the things you say." Yikes. But I can't just pick on "Accent Advisor," because they are only one of ever so many companies engaging in this sort of work. Here's the sort of advertisement you can easily come across:

Annie Ruden

A different company, "Accents Off" (what a name!), which has a tagline of "Speech and Voice Improvement" (Accents Off, n.d.), commands its potential clients to "Be clear, be confident, be heard," and says that by signing up with them, you can "realize your potential in business and in life." In business, eh? These companies give lip service to equity, of course; it's bad optics if you don't. "Accents Off" asks, "What's wrong with having an accent? Nothing! Accents contribute to our global diversity." But then they say, "In today's competitive job market, clear communication is an asset high on every employer's priority list." First, the conflation of "clear communication" and certain more acceptable accents is troublesome. Additionally, take note of how frequently the language of commerce appears in these promotions, not to mention the implication that "an accent" is something that is inherently foreign.

There's a clue about the deceit at the core of this concept though. "Accents Off" includes the following: "Your native accent will always be a part of who you are. You can switch back into your original accent whenever you want-but eliminating the "hard edges" of your non-native accent will make for a much smoother cultural and professional transition." So, first of all, anyone visiting this site is deeply mired in the native/non-native binary, but that is to be expected of companies that depend upon this concept to convince clients that their accents are a problem. Second, it's clear that this entire enterprise of accent reduction is based around the idea that assimilation into societal norms is the pragmatic approach. Third, "hard edges" is a deeply stigmatizing way to describe someone's speech. Finally, the fact that they say clients can "switch back into" their normal speech patterns is rather telling of the fact that, despite their name, they aren't actually offering to "reduce" anyone's accent (or, in their parlance, take their accents "off"). If anything, this subfield is, at best, teaching people how to perform a new accent, the way that a professional actor might when preparing for a role. For actors, they tend to call this dialect coaching, something that can absolutely be conducted in a respectful way; for these students, however, companies are preying upon their implied fears of financial instability to sell them expensive reinforcement of the fact that their own speech is less valuable, with zero engagement of the reality that it is, of course, the white perceiving subject (Flores & Rosa, 2015) who has done the devaluing. So long as we continue to ignore - or, more accurately, allow white-led companies to insist - that the problem lies within racialized languagers and not within the white listener responsible for judging "non-native" speech, this harmful cycle will continue.

There are further clues to the troubles with so-called "accent reduction" throughout the websites of this company and other similar ones. "Sankin Speech Improvement" pitches its services accordingly: "Are you tired of people asking, 'Where are you from?' Have people said, 'Welcome to the US' even though you have lived here for over ten years? Are you often asked to repeat yourself? Do you feel that others are distracted by the way that you speak and therefore are not listening to what you are saying?" (Sankin Speech Improvement, n.d.) These are real, painful, and all-too-common experiences for people who are classified as outside the boundaries of native speech, but the solution is not for the people on the receiving end of this treatment to seek help for a problem that supposedly resides within them.

The list of "accent reduction" websites is endless, and, unfortunately, would not exist were it not successful. The only way we can break free from the reliance on this deceit is to be honest about the role of the white perceivers. In other words, as members of the field of language education, we need to flip the script and pour our money and energy into training white audiences to understand unfamiliar speech, and into rewarding those who can understand more types of speech instead of convincing racialized languagers to compete against one another for how closely they can resemble the idealized English user. Ultimately, we simply need to tell the truth about who is falling short, because it is not the people being asked where they're from - it's the people asking the question.
The full text in which a version of this excerpt appears will be published in early 2023 by Multilingual Matters. References
Accent Advisor. (n.d.). Retrieved from Accent Advisor: https://english.accentadvisor.com/

Accents Off. (n.d.). Retrieved from Accents Off: https://accentsoff.com/

Faez, F. (2012). Linguistic identities and experiences of generation 1.5 teacher candidates: Race matters. TESL Canada Journal, 124-141.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 149-172.

Ramjattan, V. (2019). Racializing the problem of and solution to foreign accent in business. Applied Linguistics Review, 1-18.

Ramjattan, V. (2019). The white native speaker and inequality regimes in the private English language school. Intercultural Education, 126-140.

Sankin Speech Improvement. (n.d.). Retrieved from Sankin Speech Improvement: https://www.sankinspeechimprovement.com/non-native-speakers-accent-elimination-and-modification/

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Are you tired of people asking, 'Where are you from?'": On the inherent deceit of "accent reduction" (by JPB Gerald)

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JPB Gerald, our first guest blogger of 2022, is an EdD candidate at CUNY - Hunter College in Instructional Leadership, and a theorist seeking justice for the racially, linguistically, and neurologically minoritized. He identifies as Black and neurodivergent, though he spent most of his life unaware of the latter.