Abstract

This edited collection explores the immense potential of translanguaging in educational settings and highlights teachers and students negotiating language ideologies in their everyday communicative practices. It makes a significant contribution to scholarship on translanguaging and considers the need for pedagogy to reflect and embrace diversity. The chapters provide rich empirical research and document translanguaging in varied educational contexts, with studies from pre-school to adult education in different, mainly European, countries, where English is not the dominant language. Together they expand our understanding of translanguaging and how it can be applied to a variety of settings. This book will be of interest to students and researchers, especially in education, language education and applied linguistics, as well as to professionals and policymakers.

New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education provides readers with an assortment of theoretically and methodologically sound empirical studies that together advance a comprehensive and fresh perspective on translanguaging in educational contexts.

The book proposes translanguaging as the practical answer to current challenges of diversity and “superdiversity” (Vertovec, 2007). More importantly, the authors use the concept to explore issues related to language rights, structures of power, and socio-linguistic hierarchies. As a scholar and teacher interested in the applied dimension of these topics, I find the collection to be a rich resource that student-teachers will find useful and thought-provoking at the same time.

This book is absolutely fascinating and I would highly recommend it to any person who is working with bilingual children whether in a crèche, a primary school, a secondary school or any other educational groups and/or associations welcoming bilinguals. It gives a new light on translanguaging with examples from the English-speaking world and Scandinavian countries mostly. Those can be applied anywhere.

The book provides useful resources for a variety of potential readers, including researchers interested in sociolinguistics and education, policy makers in charge of education and language planning, and practitioners in language teaching, teacher education and student assessment.

The volume was a pleasure to read, and I firmly believe that it has done its job in working to fill the gap in documenting what translanguaging looks like in practice.

This book moves the study of translanguaging pedagogy out of the shadows of English-speaking contexts and into predominantly Nordic lights. Paulsrud, Rosén, Straszer and Wedin elegantly crack open how language has been used to discriminate in schools, and provide us with a translanguaging space filled with tension, but also with liberating possibilities for diverse voices.

This valuable and original volume is essential reading for all engaged in the field of translanguaging in education and the wider social context. Each chapter provides significant insight into current translanguaging practices in various educational contexts and beyond, and valuably paves the way for further exploration of the evolution of translanguaging in a global age.

BethAnne Paulsrud is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include multilingualism and language policy in education, English-medium instruction and linguistic ethnography.

Jenny Rosén is Assistant Professor in Language Education at Stockholm University, Sweden, and her research interests include multilingualism in educational settings, diversity and identity.

Boglárka Straszer is Assistant Professor in Swedish as a Second Language, Dalarna University, Sweden, and her research interests include multilingualism in various immigrant and minority language settings, language attitudes and identity.

Åsa Wedin is Professor in Educational Work at Dalarna University, Sweden, and her research interests include literacy and multilingualism.