Volume 41, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Translanguaging in the age of mobility: European Perspectives; Guest Editors: BethAnne Paulsrud, Jenny Rosén and Boglárka Straszer

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with embodied resources for meaning-making. The analysis aims at investigating what social space the workers construct by going between or beyond different linguistic structures, as defined in the theory of translanguaging. The study is based on Linguistic Ethnography and Conversation Analysis is used for close analysis. We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires. The findings from busy construction sites show that the stratifying aspect gives some workers a voice in the organization, while others remain silent. Hence, it is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages. The data provide an opportunity to investigate the theory of translanguaging and its transformative power in relation to professional settings that are linguistically diverse, but also strictly hierarchical.

This study discusses the impact of spatial, temporal and virtual mobility on how mobile individuals talk about language in their world, and how they use language offline and online to communicate over time and across space. We introduce the notion of chronotopic translanguaging to highlight the significance of merging time and place in sociolinguistics. Doing so, we present a rather stretched understanding of time to include references to real time, online compressed time, linguistic ideologies and practices carried over time and challenged in recent times, as well as understanding time as an ecological factor. We interviewed Ekram, an Algerian academic sojourner, and observed her Facebook profile before and after coming to the UK. Our findings suggest that the networked lives of the participant beget fluid translanguaging practices that are constantly (re)negotiated depending to the ecology of interaction. Through entering and existing multiple time-space frames, Ekram found herself reunited with communicative repertoires she has not used for years. She also developed new relationships with other repertoires. This study concludes by emphasising the usefulness of chronotopic translanguaging as a conceptual tool that permits, and accounts for, the time-place influence on how mobile individuals deploy their communicative repertoires.

The paper focuses on translanguaging practices of highly skilled refugees in a transition program in Dutch higher education. The pathways for refugees to enter higher education are full of obstacles. Acquiring the new language at a university level is one of the biggest challenges. Many institutions offer ‘transition programs’ to prepare refugees for their studies. These are mostly focused on acquiring language skills and general basic skills in subjects such as Mathematics and Cultural Diversity. The Dutch transition program described in this paper was specifically developed to make use of students’ multilingual repertoires. The resource-oriented pedagogy of translanguaging is used to give space to all languages, leverage students’ resources and contribute to their academic and language development. In this research, data from one year of the Dutch transition program was collected to study a) how teachers engage in official translanguaging practices during instruction and b) to what extent teachers develop other practices to engage with their students’ multilingual repertoires. Results from interaction analysis show that the teachers, although mainly using the language of instruction (Dutch), did use a variety of translanguaging practices, and created other ways to encourage students’ multilingualism, such as engaging in language comparisons and raising language awareness.

This paper focuses on the integration of translanguaging practices in a public preschool situated in a small village in North-West of Italy. Mobility processes and local Italian families’ school choices have led to the raise of the number of students with an immigrant background enrolled at the studied preschool up to 85%. After a brief overview regarding mobility and translanguaging in education, particularly in relation to preschool domain, I describe the macro and micro contexts of this ethnographic case study. I then focus on the analysis of the main learning activities designed by teachers to engage children’s multilingual repertoires. Later, applying qualitative content analysis, I outline the main patterns and categories emerging from interviews and focus groups conducted with teachers and parents to investigate how they experienced the marginalization of immigrant minority children in their preschool and how they received the introduction of multilingual education approach. The results shows that the adoption of a translanguaging lens contributed to the educational legitimation of language diversity and to the acknowledgment of immigrant families. Finally, I discuss the results in terms of democratic language education and social justice, underlining their implications and relevance for preschools teachers’ professional development and agency.

International mobility has caused a need for language education where adults can learn the language(s) used in their new country. In Sweden, the language programme SFI (Swedish for immigrants) provides basic second language education for adult immigrants. For those learners who are not yet functionally literate, basic literacy education is included. This article aims to explore the concept translanguaging pedagogy in relation to the articulated and embodied language norms of one SFI teacher. The empirical data, produced by ethnographic methodology, consists of classroom observations and semi-structural interviews. The method of analysis comprises a set of sociolinguistic questions, three categories of language norms (double monolingualism, integrated bilingualism and polylingualism) and discourse analysis, centering on deictics, indexical signs and reported speech. Findings show that although the teacher does engage in translanguaging practices, her teaching practices cannot be referred to as translanguaging pedagogy because she has made no deliberate decision to include the students’ full linguistic repertoires and there are contradictions both within and between her articulated and embodied language norms. It is concluded that it is crucial for educational development in contexts characterised by mobility that teachers in linguistically heterogeneous classrooms increase their awareness of their language norms and the students’ linguistic resources.

This article investigates to what extent spaces created in the language introduction programme (LIP) in Upper Secondary School in Sweden close or open up for students’ varied linguistic resources, to create an understanding of the implementational spaces of the educational environments that the school represents, and of the ideological underpinnings that these imply. In the analysis, schoolscaping is used based on displayed language on the school premises in combination with language practices in classrooms. The material analyzed consists of photographs, both from classrooms and shared spaces, together with field notes from observations. The analysis made conflicting ideologies visible. Although students were invited to use their languages in classrooms, these were rarely made visible in written form, which is remarkable as written language is given great value in school. The relative invisibility of the LIP students’ languages in the schoolscape, except for in their own classrooms, together with the physical separation from other students at the school, paints a picture of expectations of assimilation and of a monolingual ideology, where the goal is that students become Swedish-speaking. Thus, the conclusion is that there are implementational spaces in the partly closed space that constructs LIP, while ideological spaces are rather closed.

Translanguaging has now become central to a sociolinguistics that foregrounds globalization and mobility as key concepts for grasping human beings’ capacity to engage with and draw on both multiple linguistic – including named languages – and semiotic resources dynamically and in combination for the purpose of meaning-making (García, Ofelia & Wei Li. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education . New York: Palgrave/McMillan; Li, Wei. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language.  Applied Linguistics  39(1). 9–30). The contributions collected here testify to the growing importance of translanguaging as a theory and practice within contexts of unprecedented mobility, namely educational and work environments, bringing to light processes of circulation of linguistic and semiotic resources across both physical and digital spaces involving the development of communicative practices as well as subjectivities and identities.