translanguaging, online, EFL, teacher education, United States, Kazakhstan

Bridget Goodman, Nazarbayev University
Sandro Barros, Michigan State University

Translanguaging is a theory about how the bilingual mind works, a multilingual communicative phenomenon, and an array of pedagogies that support the use of students’ and teachers’ linguistic repertoires as a resource for learning and positive identity formation (Goodman & Tastanbek, 2020; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2018; Wei, 2018). As the world experienced unprecedented disruptions in education and everyday life in 2020, questions arose about how to continue to support and advocate for multilingual learners. Yet before the COVID-19 pandemic sent education and other facets of everyday life into an online format, scholars who advocated for translanguaging also advocated for awareness of the multimodal nature of translanguaging and the need to harness different media for multilingual communication (e.g. García & Kleifgen, 2019; Kleifgen, 2013). In addition, many teacher education programs and courses for working with multilingual learners in the United States had moved to a partially or completely online format before COVID-19. Given the conference theme of “bilingualism in flux”, this panel takes the view that translanguaging practices and pedagogies have been flowing into online spaces before the pandemic. At the same time, we consider whether and how translanguaging practices and pedagogies, and teacher beliefs about translanguaging, have traversed these broader fluctuations in teaching practices. There are two questions this panel seeks to address through presentation of empirical research and discussion: How can student and teacher beliefs about translanguaging be shaped by teachers and teacher educators in online spaces? How can language and content teachers continue to engage in and support translanguaging communication practices and translanguaging pedagogies in an online space?

References:
García, O., & Kleifgen, J. (2019). Translanguaging and literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 1-19 https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.286.
Goodman, B. & Tastanbek, S. (2020). Making the shift from a codeswitching to a translanguaging lens in English language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.571
Kleifgen, J. (2013). Communicative practices at work: Multimodality and learning in a high-tech firm. Multilingual Matters.
Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2018). A translanguaging view of the linguistic system of bilinguals. Applied Linguistics Review, aop, 1-27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2018-0020
Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039

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