Countering the Dual Transglossia, Dynami

Countering the Dual: Transglossia, Dynamic Bilingualism, and Translanguaging in Education Ofelia Garcia

Lambert (1974) additive bilingualism and subtractive bilingualism bilingual-> dual

Overarching question: the tactics of trans.  If we take the imposition/adoption of categories as a political act, analyze these moments in terms of who is acting and in the service of what agenda. What are the possibilities here?

“dual language” as a retreating position of bilingual educators. 

‘diglossia’ erases, normalizes power relationships within language communities. (107)

The term ‘subaltern’ is used. 

Suggest structural similarity while rejecting the equation of CS with natural langauge (CS as foreign langauge)—this would in itself be reflective of an ideology suggesting language is a essentially just a syntactical and semantic structure, without the social and cultural practices to which human languages are always attached. 

the global designs of nation states and their education systems have much to do with social systems of domination and subordination of groups telating to language, ethnicity, race and class. By focusing on the local positionality of bilingual speakers, and especially of emergent bilingual students, it is possible to break out of the duality that strictly separates the dominant language of the state, and especially the aca­ demic standard language, from the language practices of people and students. (116)

In this article, García traces the workings of language ideologies in US education policy from Lambert’s (1974) theory of additive and subtractive bilingualism, to the replacement of bilingual education with dual language education and the adoption of terms such as limited-English proficient, which frame students exclusively in terms of their status as speakers or nonspeakers of English. Accompanying the shift in terminology, bilingual teachers were replaced by “English-as-a-second-language” teachers, erasing both the conceptual and the social space in which a student might be “’bilingual’ with a complex linguistic repertoire that has features that cannot be simply assigned to one language or another.” (p. 107) García challenges diglossia, a conception of possessing two monolithic languages, with transglossia, (p. 108) “a societal stable, and yet dynamic, communicative network … with many languages in functional interrelationship.” Transglossia, grounded in “communities of practices” rather than static “speech communities,” becomes the basis of translanguaging as a pedagogy. García draws on sociocultural constructivism to suggest that “a pedagogy that builds on the fluid languaging of bilingual children” (p. 101) could be a rich environment in which to “develop new understandings and new language practices, including academic language practices.” (p. 112)