Translingualism in Language Classrooms

We are functioning in a world fundamentally characterized by objects in motion. These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques. This is a world of flows.

--Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large

The hubs: What are you eating? Bellum?

Me: Na. The gur is salty. I am actually having the last few peanuts...Tumi khaabe naaki?

Many of our conversations at home look like this. The hubs will occasionally intersperse his English with Telugu words and I will respond in Benglish. I am not sure when we began to communicate in this manner, but, after almost seven years of knowing each other, we have come to a point where we have begun to understand each other's languages without being formally trained in either. Many of my friends and colleagues are surprised by the ease with which I can move between English, Hindi, and Bengali (and a wee bit of Telugu), but the truth is that this kind of linguistic hybridity is rather unremarkable in a world where about half of the world's population is bilingual and shuttle between languages on a regular basis. 

However, in spite of the frequency of such translingual exchanges, composition teachers have shied away from importing dialogues about other languages into their "English" classrooms. As someone who has taught in multiple ESL and first-year composition programs before, I am familiar with the commonly (over)used piece of advice meted out to English Language Learners with striking passion and alacrity: If you want to learn English, you must stop thinking in/using your native language. To learn English, you must think in English. This kind of logic may have once proved useful, but the reality is that all speakers in today's diverse settings have to "mediate complex encounters among interlocutors with different language capacities and cultural imaginations, who have different social and political memories and who don't necessarily share a common understanding of the social reality they are living in" (Kramsch and Whiteside 646). To restrict a person's knowledge and use of other languages is to strip the speaker off of some of the tools of his/her trade and ask him/her to construct something out of nothing. 

If we are to see our classrooms as microcosms of a greatly altered (and altering) cultural landscape, we would need to think of ways of having conversations about language that will prepare our students (and us) for the "complex encounters" that will characterize many of their private and public lives in the not-so distant future. We will need to think about the kinds of reading and writing that must take place in our classrooms to enable all writers (whether monolingual, multidialectal, multilingual, or translingual) to learn and adapt to a variety of rhetorical situations. Not only that, but we will also need to think about faculty development opportunities that will allow instructors (and admins) to inch away from English-only practices to the conceptualization and development of translingual pedagogies that are relevant, authentic and that do the kind of "living English work" that Min-Zhan Lu and many others have made a case for.