Li Wei

Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors of this article reject the type of “abyssal thinking” that erases the existence of counter-hegemonic knowledges and lifeways, adopting instead the “from the inside out” perspective that is required for thinking constructively about the language and education of racialized bilinguals. On the basis of deep personal experience and extensive field-work research, we challenge prevailing assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that are based on raciolinguistic ideologies with roots in colonialism. Adopting a translanguaging perspective that rejects rigid colonial boundaries of named languages, we argue that racialized bilingual learners, like all students, draw from linguistic-semiotic, cultural, and historical repertoires. The decolonial approach that guides our work reveals these students making a world by means of cultural and linguistic practices derived from their own knowledge systems. We propose that in order to attain justice and success, a decolonial education must center non-hegemonic modes of “otherwise thinking” by attending to racialized bilinguals’ knowledges and abilities that have always existed yet have continually been distorted and erased through abyssal thinking. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15427587.2021.1935957)

The present study contributes to a well-established line of applied linguistics research in educational contexts on how teachers can make connections between their students’ out-of-school knowledge and experiences and what they learn in the classroom by examining a hitherto under-explored context, namely English-medium-instruction (EMI) mathematics classes in Hong Kong (HK). Adopting a translanguaging perspective, the study examines how fluid and dynamic meaning-making practices afford opportunities for teachers to bring the outside into the EMI classroom in order to support the students’ learning of new academic knowledge. The data for the present paper is based on a linguistic ethnography project in a HK secondary school where EMI is practised. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is carried out on the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interview data analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings demonstrate how the teacher constructs a translanguaging space by integrating the students’ everyday life experience in an institutional learning space. It is argued that translanguaging thus helps to transform the EMI classroom into a lived experience, which in turn enhances content learning. The theoretical and pedagogical implications for EMI in other contexts are explored.

Recent studies on English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classroom interaction have begun to look at the role of translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in supporting participants to exploit multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate content teaching and learning. The present study contributes to this growing body of literature by focussing on playful talk in multiple languages and modalities in EMI mathematics classrooms in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Based on the data collected from a linguistic ethnography, we analyse how the teacher constructs playful talk in order to achieve various pedagogical goals including building rapport, facilitating content explanation and promoting meaningful communication with students. The analysis demonstrates that translanguaging appears to be a critical resource and that several social factors, including the teacher's personal belief, history, sociocultural and pedagogical knowledge, play a role in constructing playful talk. The playful talk transforms the classroom into a translanguaging space which in turn allows the teacher and students to perform a range of creative acts and experiment with a variety of voices to facilitate the meaning-making and knowledge construction processes.

The purpose of this article is to explore the role of embodied repertories in teaching and learning in a multi-ethnic karate club in East London and its implications for language teaching and learning. We do so through the lens of translanguaging and apply the concept of translanguaging space where diverse semiotic systems are integrated and orchestrated. Through a close examination of how teaching and learning takes place in the karate club, we argue that embodied repertories are central to interactions and pedagogy. The coach  manages and instructs the class through orchestration of embodied repertories and verbal instructions. Learning Japanese karate terms becomes part of embodied performance, repeated, copied and polished along with drilling of physical moves, whilst the other available linguistic repertories, Polish and English, become languages of discipline, explanation, elaboration or reinforcement. Such translanguaging practices serve the purpose of the karate club envisaged by the coach and become an effective way of communication amongst the participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds. The notion of translanguaging, in particular, the idea of orchestration, helps to highlight the multiplexity of resources in embodied teaching and learning and overcomes the monolingual and the lingual biases.

This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that we call Tranßcripting – writing, designing and digitally generating new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts
created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social interaction. We analyse the dynamic processes of how such scripts are created that transcend language boundaries as well as transforming the subjectivities of the writer and the reader. We are particularly interested in the playful subversiveness of such practices, and discuss it against the background of uni-scriptal
language ideology in China. We are also interested in the
methodological challenges of researching such practices, including the challenge of drawing distinctions between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘unordinary’. We analyse the data from a translanguaging perspective.

This paper seeks to address the question how people go about intercultural differences in an institutional setting which aims to mediate between the socio-legal system and the ‘outsiders’ of the system, i.e. ordinary citizens, through an investigation of professional interactions between a legal advisor and her clients of Eastern European backgrounds in London. Drawing data from a linguistic ethnography, the analysis foregrounds the way the advisor translates and humanises the system, in particular, through the practice of re-semiotisation and calibration. The second aim of the paper is to extend the notion of ‘intercultural moments’ (previously defined as ‘moments in encounters during which cultural and linguistic differences between people become manifest’ by Bolden, 2014, p. 208) and to explore its analytical benefits in understanding fleeting and seemingly mundane moments in encounters in which participants negotiate and orient to (intercultural) differences spontaneously while collaborating to achieve the goals in institutional encounters.

This article argues that imagination plays a key role in whether and how members of transnational families individually and collectively maintain or relinquish their heritage languages and adopt other languages as part of their multilingual repertoires. Imagination is defined here as the vision of where and what one might be or become at some future point in time. We base our argument on linguistic ethnography over two decades with transnational families of Chinese ethnic origin in the UK. Families that seem to have kept their heritage languages and families that have given them up were invited to talk about where, what and how they would see themselves in ten years' time, and a selection of them are subsequently interviewed and observed after the ten-year period. Their responses are analysed in terms of their constructed experiences, environments and visions of the future; their perceptions and imaginations of different places and cultures; key moments in re-evaluation, or re-imagining, that led to major behavioural changes; and self-evaluation of their imaginations. Particular attention is given to the dynamics of differences and tensions between the imaginations of individuals of the same families, as well as changes to the imaginations over time. Theoretical and methodological implications of studying imagination as a key factor for language maintenance and language shift, and for bilingualism research generally, are discussed.

This article explores language learning as a process of translanguaging and of cultural translation. We draw examples from a sociolinguistic ethnography of translanguaging practices in a karate club in east London, UK. Formulaic Japanese is taught as part of karate techniques, practised as the language of performance and rituals and valued as the key indicator of karate expertise over other languages. Key karate verbal routines such as osu and kiai, while linguistically difficult to translate, bespeak core karate values such as respect and confidence, and equally important, the embodiment of these verbal routines is well integrated into karate moves, breaking down the dichotomy of verbal and physical dimensions of the interaction. The predominant use of formulaic Japanese in rituals, along with other semiotic resources, creates an imagined karate world characterized by hierarchy and guarded through the value of respect. In examining whose karate and how cultural traditions, values and practices are translated and why, we broaden the concept of language and regard it as a multifaceted sense-and meaning-making resource and explore the theoretical implications of taking language teaching and learning as a process of cultural translation.

Translanguaging intercultural communication is only at its beginning. As a ground-breaking new way of understanding language and communication, Translanguaging refers to the dynamic meaning-making process whereby multilingual speakers go beyond conventional divides between named languages and between modalities to act, to know and to be (Garcia and Li 2014).  In this chapter, we first outline the origins and development of the notion and then discuss how the notion helps to further our understanding of intercultural communication and review the critical issues and topics that emerged in the recent years. The ‘trans-’ in translanguaging challenges the lingual bias and the deficit/difference model still prevalent in intercultural communication research. It leads us away from a focus on ‘languages’ as distinct codes to a focus on the agency of individuals engaged in creating, deploying, and interpreting signs for communication.  It also gives us a new perspective on conducting language-related research as it urges us to transcend the boundaries between socially constructed language systems and structures and between language and other cognitive and semiotic systems, as well as the divides between linguistics, psychology, and communication.

The original discussion of Translanguaging as a pedagogical practice by Williams and Baker included modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As it has been developed as a theoretical concept, Translanguaging embraces the multimodal social semiotic view that linguistic signs are part of a wider repertoire of modal resources that sign makers have at their disposal and that carry particular socio-historical and political associations (Kress 2015). It foregrounds the different ways language users employ, create, and interpret different kinds of signs to communicate across contexts and participants and perform their different subjectivities. In particular, Translanguaging highlights the ways in which language users make use of the tensions and conflicts among different signs, because of the socio-historical associations the signs carry with them, in a cycle of resemiotization and transformation. In a similar effort, Angel Lin builds on Halliday’s notion of ‘trans-semiotic’ (2013) and develops the term ‘trans-semiotizing’ to highlight the tension-filled yet seamless flow of entanglement of multiple meaning making resources (Lin 2019). Hawkins (2018) proposes the notion of ‘transmodalities’, linked to critical cosmopolitanism, to embrace the processes of semiosis across place, space, and time that transcend the local, to become translocal and transnational, indexing the diversity of actors engaged in new configurations of communicative engagements in a globalized, technologized world.  The present issue gathers together a range of studies based in a variety of sociolinguistic, economic-political and educational contexts.

The original discussion of Translanguaging as a pedagogical practice by Williams and Baker included modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As it has been developed as a theoretical concept, Translanguaging embraces the multimodal social semiotic view that linguistic signs are part of a wider repertoire of modal resources that sign makers have at their disposal and that carry particular socio-historical and political associations (Kress 2015). It foregrounds the different ways language users employ, create, and interpret different kinds of signs to communicate across contexts and participants and perform their different subjectivities. In particular, Translanguaging highlights the ways in which language users make use of the tensions and conflicts among different signs, because of the socio-historical associations the signs carry with them, in a cycle of resemiotization and transformation. In a similar effort, Angel Lin builds on Halliday’s notion of ‘trans-semiotic’ (2013) and develops the term ‘trans-semiotizing’ to highlight the tension-filled yet seamless flow of entanglement of multiple meaning making resources (Lin 2019). Hawkins (2018) proposes the notion of ‘transmodalities’, linked to critical cosmopolitanism, to embrace the processes of semiosis across place, space, and time that transcend the local, to become translocal and transnational, indexing the diversity of actors engaged in new configurations of communicative engagements in a globalized, technologized world.  The present issue gathers together a range of studies based in a variety of sociolinguistic, economic-political and educational contexts.

... One recent study (Dodd, So and Li, 1996) examined the developmental realisa-tions of 16 children, 25-41 months old, who ... other studies have also reported delayed development of receptive vocabulary and specific aspects of syntax in French-English bilingual children i(eg ...

Transnational and multilingual families have become commonplace in the 21 st century. Yet relatively few attempts have been made from applied and socio-linguistics perspectives to understand what is going on within such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday life; how they cope with the new and ever-changing environment, and how they construct their identities and build social relations. In this article we start from the premise that bilingualism and multilingualism mean different things to different generations and individuals within the same family. Additive Bilingualism, which is often celebrated for the positive benefits of adding a second language and culture without replacing or displacing the first, cannot be taken for granted as a common experience of the individuals in transnational families. Using data gathered from a sociolinguistic ethnography of three multilingual and transnational families from China in Britain, we discuss the experiences of different generations and individuals in dealing with bilingualism and multilingualism and how their experiences affect the way individual family members perceive social relations and social structures and construct and present their own identities. The key argument we wish to put forward is that more attention needs to be paid to the diverse experiences of the individuals and to thèstrategies they use to deal with the challenges of multilingualism, rather than the overall patterns of language maintenance and language shift.

... Shift Li Wei and Lesley Milroy 128 9 The Imagined Learner of Malay Anthea Fraser ... vi Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles 12 Rethinking Bilingual Acquisition FredGenesee 204 Laudatio: Hugo Baetens ... Our problem was that, for the lay parent, if anything at all was written ...

In transnational and multilingual families, the learning and use of as well as socialisation through the so-called ‘home, community or minority’ languages is often embedded in everyday conversations during joint activities such as mealtimes. One aspect that is receiving increasing attention from researchers is children’s agency in language use and socialisation. In this paper, we use the interactional data of mealtimes in a multilingual Arabic and English-speaking family to examine children’s agency and creativity in their multiple language use. We look closely at how such language use reflects children’s awareness of language ideologies (often contradictory and competing), how they negotiate that knowledge and importantly how it influences their choice of language or their choice of particular linguistic features in a given language. The intense face-to-face tempo-spatially controlled activity of mealtimes affords a unique environment like no other in which children and parents are forced to use language in ingenious often-unpredictable ways to address the needs of the interaction as they unfold over the interaction time. Through such language use family language policies and local language policies and practices are challenged and brought to the fore. The data reveals that parents choose one language over the other or choose a particular grammatical form in one language to index their feelings of affect, to teach and socialise, to connect, to assert their authority and create solidarity as well as enforce their language ideologies. Whilst children use language in the same way to resist socialisation, to be socialisers themselves, to transform language practices or to conform and appease their parents as well as show closeness and solidarity at the same time. Both children and parents use language to achieve their own distinct interactional goals, and to display and negotiate their identities. Hence the outcome is that mealtime language use is ever richer and ever innovative and both children and parents undergo a change at the end of each episode as a result of such language use.

Selected References
Lanza, E. (2007). Multilingualism and the Family. In Li Wei & P. Auer (Eds.), The Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication Berlin Mouton de Gruyter
Li Wei. (1994). Three generations, two languages, one family: Language choice and language shift in a Chinese Community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
King, Fogle, L., & Logan-Terry, A. (2008). Family Language Policy Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 907-922
Ochs, E., & Shohet, M. (2006). The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization. In R. Larson, A. Wiley & K. Branscomb (Eds.), New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development (pp. 35-50). San Francisco Jossey-Bass.
Tannen, D., Kendall, S., & Gordon, C. (Eds.). (2007). Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families Oxford Oxford University Press
Said, F.F.S.  (2008) A community of Practice: Building Yemeni Ethnic Identity through compliment giving and receiving. (MA unpublished thesis), Birkbeck, University of London, London. 
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3), 193-229.
Woolard, K. A. (1998). Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry In B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 3-47). Oxford Oxford University Press.
Zhu Hua. (2010). Language socialization and interculturality: address terms in intergenerational talk in Chinese diasporic families. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10(3), 189-205.