According to Lucena, in recent decades, unprecedented transformations, generated by the globalization process, have affected societies. Limits of time and space were changed, increasing mobility and contact between people, through technologies and various existing communicative resources, quickly and intensely.
Translanguaging is not just bilingualism, because it goes far beyond two separate languages, parallel monolingualism, as it implies the use of the speaker's entire linguistic repertoire to make communication effective.
Translanguaging is not just code-switching of separate monolingual languages, as in code-switching. While in code-switching languages are used in separate ways and without interaction, in translanguaging there is the idea of a unitary linguistic system, reevaluating linguistic practices and communicative patterns.
The process of naming languages served the interests of the colonizer, bringing abysmal thinking, that is, dividing reality into two kingdoms, declaring linguistic practices positioned on the other side of the line to be non-existent, that is, the colonizer's line.
However, this process of prioritizing certain languages, such as English in this case, makes people and, in our study, students, feel oppressed, as we see in Shakina Rajendram's text. According to research, analysis and monitoring presented in the text, students like Amira and Malini compare themselves to a prisoner and a bird trapped in a cage, as they cannot express themselves using their own linguistic repertoires, their languages.
Focusing on this reality and in dialogue with the teacher who participated in the research, she reported that she herself had suffered embarrassment for not knowing how to express herself so well in English. In her professional development course, she was shown videos of native speakers as role models, at which point she felt embarrassed because she didn't consider her English to be that good, and she didn't want her students to feel that way either.
After that, the teacher changed her attitude in the classroom and began to work and see translanguaging as an enriching tool in the students' learning process. The student interviewed reported that when she and her friends were able to express themselves in the classroom using their entire repertoire, not just English, they felt as if the cage had been opened and they were flying free.
Translanguaging addresses the role of language in its contemporary social context, helping students to create alternative ways and paths to communicate and make themselves understood.
Therefore, according to Rajendram, languages were named as part of colonial projects around the Globe, thus the aim of translanguaging pedagogy should be, in addition to uniting languages, to disinvent and reconstitute language teaching.
References:
Rajendram. S. (2022). “Our country has gained independence, but we haven’t”: Collaborative translanguaging to decolonize English language teaching. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42, p. 78–86.
Lucena, M. H. (2021). O papel da translinguagem na Linguística Aplicada (in) disciplinar. Revista da Anpoll, Florianópolis, v. 52, n. 2, p. 25-43, jun.-out.
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