Gaspard Monge, el padre de la Geometría Descriptiva

There are two approaches to translanguaging. One approach came from bilingual pedagogy (e.g. Williams, 1994, 1996; Baker, 2011; García, 2009). The other approach came from languaging (e.g. works of Becker and Swain). The following sections introduce these two approaches and discuss how they contribute to a new understanding of language education.

3.2.1.1 Translanguaging from the perspective of bilingual pedagogy

The earliest definition of translanguaging was from Cen Williams, in the context of Welsh bilingual classrooms. The term translanguaging was translated from the Welsh term ‘‘trawsieithu’’, which was initially coined to name a pedagogical practice which deliberately switches the language mode of input and output in bilingual classrooms:

translanguaging means that you receive information through the medium of one language (e.g., English) and use it yourself through the medium of the other language (e.g., Welsh). Before you can use that information successfully, you must have fully understood it” (Williams, 1996:64). In this situation, the language switch is strategic and deliberate rather than random. It involves ‘‘using one language to reinforce the other in order to increase understanding and in order to augment the pupil’s ability in both

languages’’ (Williams, 2002:40, cited in Lewis, Jones & Baker, 2012). It helps to scaffold one language with another. The term ‘scaffolding’ was first used by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) to describe the role of tutoring in helping the problem-solving skills of children. In that context, scaffolding means that adults “[control] those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence” (p.90). While there are studies on the use of scaffolding techniques by teachers in bilingual

classrooms, a lot of them are still focused on the teachers’ use of the target language for scaffolding language learning in a multilingual classroom (e.g. Walqui, 2006; Saxena, 2010). However, in recent years, studies on multilingual classrooms have started to focus on teachers’ use of multiple languages for scaffolding. They value the multiple and mobile repertoires that students and their families bring to the classroom which can support students’ development of multilingualism (Hornberger and Link, 2012).

Translanguaging challenges existing assumptions of language learning by emphasising the dynamic model of bilingualism whereby multiple language practices are being used to adjust to the multilingual and multimodal terrain of the communicative situations that people encounter (García, 2009, 2011; García and Flores, 2014; García and Kano, 2014). Instead of keeping the

languages separated, a dynamic bilingualism model suggests the fuzziness and fluidity of the languages which are identifiable but inseparable (see section 3.4.1 of this chapter). Translanguaging challenges the traditional dichotomy of separating languages into L1, L2, or Lx, as well as the dichotomy of native versus non-native speakers. Translanguaging is concerned with the entire repertoire of speakers, rather than structural knowledge of specific languages separately (Li Wei, 2018). The goal of language learning is to achieve

bilingualism or multilingualism, not at the expense of the other language(s) that learners already know.

3.2.1.2 Translanguaging from the perspective of languaging

Another approach to translanguaging is from the perspective of languaging, which informs the current conceptualisation of translanguaging used in this thesis. Becker defined languaging as “a skill learned over a lifetime, not a system of systems perfected in infancy” (Becker, 1991:34). It is an ongoing process which foregrounds the agency of language users in the meaning- making process. Similarly, Swain (2006) described languaging as “the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (p.98). For her, language is more than a conveyor of meaning; language is also an agent in problem-solving and making meaning. Swain (2006) concluded that “languaging about language is one of the ways we learn language” (p.98). From this, it can be seen that Swain sees language learning as more of a process than an outcome, which involves the joint negotiation and creation of meaning (Swain and Lapkin, 2013). Moreover, Bagga-Gupta regarded languaging as “ways-of-being-with-words” which highlighted the idea of “language as a process, and product of social activity, or a practice of interactional agency” (Gynne and Bagga-Gupta, 2015:512; see also Bagga-Gupta, 2014). Phipps and Gonzalez (2014) offered a broader understanding of languaging which is

particularly relevant to the globalised, superdiverse world. They see languaging as a life skill which is “inextricably interwoven with social experience” (p.3), and as a dynamic process which “changes constantly as that experience evolves and changes” (p.4). They concluded by calling for a paradigm shift from a focus on language learning to languaging.

All these definitions of languaging foreground the fact that multilingual language users strategically use language as a tool to learn. Swain (2006) presented examples of how students learned about different aspects of a language by “talking-it-through”, in other words, they used language as a tool to mediate their cognition in order to solve a problem. Languaging, as Swain (2006) observed, “mediated the students’ language learning by drawing their attention to language-related problems they had, and by giving them the tools to reason with, to solutions” (p.105-106). The languaging approach to translanguaging gives emphasis to the metalinguistic awareness of learners so that learning is made more explicit.

The above definitions of languaging are mostly based in the sociocultural tradition. The conceptualisation of translanguaging used in this thesis is also informed by the work of ecological psychologists such as Nigel Love, Stephen Cowley, Paul Thibault, and Sune Steffensen who offer a cognitive perspective of languaging based on the distributed view of language. They see languaging as a “distributed and heterogeneous biocultural resource that is spread over persons, environmental affordances, artifacts, cultural patterns, and values” (Thibault, 2011:240). From their point of view, languaging is distributed between the brain, body, and the social and cultural world, and is “spread across

spatiotemporal scales ranging from the neural to the cultural” (Thibault, 2011:210).

Language is thus seen as a dynamic system that arises from situational behaviours of interlocutors. The language that people produce in a visible and audible way is a product of first-order activity, languaging (Cowley, 2017;

Thibault, 2011, 2017; Steffensen, 2011). This view challenges the classical view of language of Saussure whose fundamental idea is that language is an object, a fixed-code that people all share. In particular, Thibault suggested that first- order languaging “is an experiential flow that is enacted, maintained, and changed by the real-time activity of participants” (2017:74), and therefore it is a whole-body sense-making activity (Thibault, 2011, 2017). He explained that first-order languaging “includes a whole range of bodily resources that are assembled and coordinated in languaging events together with external

(extrabodily) aspects of situations” (2011:215). Audible sounds and verbal patterns, which are conventionally considered as ‘language’, are actually second-order language - “reified products of first-order languaging” (Thibault, 2017:80). The central argument here is the refusal to reduce language to “linguistic objects”, or “formal abstracta” that are separated from first-order languaging as suggested by the classical view of language held by Saussure (Love, 2004, 2007, 2017; Thibault, 2011, 2017; Cowley, 2017). To summarise, one must grant “languaging a primacy over what is languaged” (Love, 2016, cited in Cowley, 2017:48). Therefore, it can be seen that languaging is an orchestration of the neural- bodily-worldly skills which are multilingual, multimodal, multisensory, and multisemiotic.

Thus far the discussion on languaging shows that multimodality and

multilingualism are incorporated in translanguaging, further suggesting that language is a “multilingual, multisemiotic, multisensory, and multimodal resource for sense- and meaning-making” (Li Wei, 2018:22). The discussion below moves on to the Trans- prefix, on how it adds to the above discussion of languaging by highlighting the multilingual and multimodal nature of

Translanguaging.

According to García and Li Wei (2014:3), the ‘trans’ prefix in translanguaging refers to the following aspects of language and education:

1) Trans-system and trans-spaces 2) Trans-formative nature

3) Trans-disciplinary

To summarise, these ‘trans-‘ features of translanguaging emphasise the idea that translanguaging is not just going between languages, but also beyond languages. It also challenges the view that there are boundaries between languages and other cognitive systems as separate modules (cf. the Modularity of Mind hypothesis). As Thierry (2016) pointed out, research evidence does not suggest that the human mind can be divided into different languages.

Furthermore, Translanguaging has a transformative capacity. As mentioned in Li Wei (2016),

[translanguaging] transforms the form, function and meaning of the sign, linguistic or otherwise; it also creates a space for the multilingual

language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and

meaningful performance, and making language use into a lived experience (p.8)

In this thesis, the transformative capacity of Translanguaging can be seen by the creative and critical ways that language learners used when they mobilise their multilingual and multisemiotic resources for their learning. Translanguaging is therefore also a resemiotization process (Iedema, 2003), referring to actions which allow language learners to create new meanings while transforming a sign from one semiotic mode to another. Everytime a sign is transformed, new meanings emerged. Examples of this include New Chinglish, in which English utterances are being re-appropriated with morphological rules of English but with Chinese meanings (see Li Wei, 2016, 2018). As a result, there is a need for applied linguists to go beyond the artificial divide of linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of language learning. In Chapter Seven of the thesis, I demonstrate this transformative capacity of translanguaging by examining the two cases of Chinese learning by the creation of multimodal texts.