Event overview
Bilingual Education and translanguaging: Who’s willing to transgress? Dr Sávio Siqueira, Bahia Federal University
As an approach to use of language in bi/pluri/multilingual contexts, translanguaging has rarely been institutionally endorsed in bilingual education. On the contrary, in many realities, teachers and learners frequently feel guilty or insecure towards such practices, and, indirectly, support and follow prevailing ones that came to be labeled as “two solitudes assumption” (Cummings 2008), “parallel monolingualism” (Heller 1999), “two monolinguals in one body” (Gravelle 1996), among others.
Bilingual education has been experiencing a boom in many parts of the world, including Brazil, where elite schools of that sort have been flourishing and expanding year after year. However, the great majority of Brazilian teachers engage in bilingual education heavily oriented by a foreign language tradition, leading to situations in which translingual practices are “tolerated” or deemed secondary at best, as along the way, practitioners are practically compelled to reject it in order to avoid a supposed cross-contamination of languages. Taking translanguaging as a transcending, transformative, transdisciplinary, and, above all, transgressive educational policy, “politically charged and disruptive by virtue” (Wei 2011; Prada & Nikula 2018: 1), this presentation seeks to explore the political and ideological implications of translanguaging in bilingual education, discussing qualitative data generated in a focus group discussion with Brazilian teachers from local elite bilingual schools where English is the default foreign language.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Oct 2019 | 4:30pm - 5:30pm |
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