Translanguaging Happens: What I did on my holidays

By Eve Smith, Language Centre

(The title is a tribute to the late Sir Terry Pratchett. In his book Interesting Times there is a revolutionary treatise entitled “What I did in my holidays”.)

I have been working on scholarship projects on translanguaging for a while now. Over the past two decades translanguaging has moved beyond the narrow notion of bilinguals switching between two named languages.  It is now seen more holistically as a model of communication that goes beyond “the linguistic” and “incorporates an understanding of how different modes, including our bodies […] add to the semiotic meaning making repertoire” (García and Otheguy 2020).  While I have largely been thinking about translanguaging from a pedagogical perspective it has been a long time since I have really been in the shoes of the language learners that I work with.  This has changed recently with my old-lady brain struggling desperately to learn some very basic Chinese and a recent trip to Sweden.  I felt that some of these insights might be worth sharing.

My mother is Swedish.  I was not raised in a bilingual household, but with a healthy respect for language and language learning, what might now be considered an understanding of the value of a broad linguistic repertoire (Tai and Wei 2020).  At school I learned French and German, studying a joint honours degree in Drama (the subject I was interested in) and German (the language that would give me access to a greater understanding of Brecht and Buchner).  As part of my degree, I took a year of Swedish language, the handful of phrases that I had learned as a child were mostly covered in the first week, but over the course of a year I developed a good grounding in Swedish grammar and a good level of fluency.

Time passed.

I worked in jobs where I didn’t have any reason to use my languages and I developed the coping translanguaging strategy of responding in English to conversations in either German or Swedish (Fang and Liu 2020).  Although German was less common there were visits from Swedish speaking aunts/uncles/cousins at least once a year, so my passive knowledge of Swedish was maintained at a lower level, but I didn’t do the work of actively speaking Swedish.  Even on the less frequent visits to Sweden, the prevalence of English meant that I didn’t “need” to use the knowledge that I had worked so hard to acquire.

Early in 2024 my mum announced that she was going to Sweden to renew her passport, in her 80s she finds it easier to go to Sweden and do this in person rather deal with the technology involved in doing it from home.  I offered to accompany her as I done on many previous occasions.  However, having spent a year struggling with Chinese on Duolingo, I decided to be a little more active in my Swedish translanguaging.  For a couple of weeks before we left, I spent some time doing Swedish Duolingo every evening.  I skipped though levels by taking a level test and found that I had still retained a lot of grammar, including subject and object pronouns, I initially made several errors with the possessive pronouns.  I also comfortably whizzed through the suffix definite article and plural forms (Holmes and Hinchliffe 1997).

Tidning = newspaper

En tidning = a newspaper

Tidningen = the newspaper

Tidningar = newspapers

Tidningarna = the newspapers

Amazingly I found that in most cases I used the correct article for gender/neuter.  Not because the division is simple, it isn’t.  Somehow the rules that I had learned as an undergraduate over 30 years ago had become internalised, I can’t remember all the rules, but mostly I make the right choices.  All this made me aware just how much I was struggling with Chinese, but I resolved to keep practicing both languages.

For the bilingual/multilingual person, the linguistic repertoire offers choices, some of the items in the repertoire from different named languages may be more useful or more appropriate for different situations (Canagarajah 2018).  For the language learner, the L1 is almost always easier, and the use of the target language requires effort.  On this trip to Sweden, I had resolved to make the effort, however, as many of our students will know, even when you have made that decision translanguaging still just happens.  During the week in Sweden, I was aware of choices that I made in order to effectively communicate in a range of situations.

In public situations I attempted to use Swedish, I look Swedish enough that I am not automatically treated as a foreigner.  Having heard Swedish all my life also means that my pronunciation is much better than my vocabulary.  Please/Thank you are easy.  I can order a coffee, but my Mum is dairy/gluten intolerant.  This gave rise to a translanguaging incident because I did not have the essential vocabulary in this instance:

“Jag will ha två cappuccino, en med “Oatmilk?”?”  [I would like two cappuccinos, one with “Oatmilk”]

I used a rising intonation on “Oatmilk” to suggest that I was questioning if it had been understood.  The cashier recognised the word and responded with the Swedish word “havremjölk”, which I then recognised.   While some Swedes are very confident in English and will automatically swap once they realise Swedish is not my first language this cashier did not, the remainder of the transaction occurred in Swedish.  Both of us were employing this little bit of translanguaging, a label quest (Wang and Curdt-Christiansen 2019), in order to communicate a vital concept within what was otherwise a monolingual exchange. When the barista brought the drinks, she said in Swedish which coffee was which and repeated in English which one had oatmilk, enhanced by physically pointing at the relevant cup (Canals 2021).  For anyone with food allergies this is vital information, so she was translanguaging in terms of both the use of two named languages and the multimodality of body language to highlight the key piece of information reinforcing the communicative act.

Stockholm is a cosmopolitan city, I could easily have ordered the coffee in English, which I have done on previous visits.  However, the attempt to use Swedish in everyday interactions led me to uncover a very small gap in the vocabulary needed for these basic transactions.  Translanguaging allows me to communicate, without just ditching the Swedish, it also helps me expand my linguistic repertoire.

While interactions in public spaces generally conform to fairly basic patterns, conversations with extended family members were less easy to navigate and while I attempted to use some Swedish, the nuance and complexity required were frequently beyond me.  The translanguaging strategies that I employed varied depending on the context, the topic and who I was with.

A lunch with aunts and cousins of my mother’s generation meant that most of the conversation happened in Swedish, with occasional explanations in English for my benefit.  As my passive Swedish is much better than my active Swedish, I often found myself listening and attempting to understand even when things were not entirely clear. Noticing is a key part of understanding language and for me noticing which words were impeding my understanding was crucial.  In one part of the conversation, I realised the aunts were talking about trains (bahn) not children (barn) and mentally reinscribed the previous bits of the discussion that had not made sense.  In the same discussion I asked for clarification of the word “pendel” (commute) as I didn’t see the relevance for a group of retired ladies.  I quietly concluded that the word was used for a general “going into the city centre” rather than simply travelling to and from work, but I was only able to do this, because I had clarified the meaning of that keyword, further examples of the “label quest” in which the speaker searches for the appropriate term in a particular named language (Wang and Curdt-Christiansen 2019).

While I was quite happy not to be included in the conversation, which I felt was rather dull, the speed at which the aunts/cousins talked meant that I had no chance of really being active in the discussion as my brain was translating and constantly playing catch up.  Something that I also find problematic in my Chinese lessons.  Although I put it down to my “old lady brain”, I am also aware that practice is the only way to improve this.  However, the issue of trying to keep up with an L1 speaker of your L2 is a common problem for language learners, and may be seen as a stage on the language learning journey that we all need to traverse.

One evening one of my cousins, Pelle, invited us to dinner at his home, along with my photographer aunts and an architect/photographer friend of his.  There was discussion on photography topics in Swedish, which I can understand, but not really contribute to, both in terms of my Swedish and in terms of my rather inferior knowledge of photography.   There was also a lot of conversation on environment issues as my cousin works in environmental policy.  These are not topics which my Swedish vocabulary can cope with, but various people translated parts and my cousin and I discussed the current Swedish government’s failings in English, with regular contributions from his friend.  My aunts commented later that they thought the discussion was really interesting and would have liked to join in, but that Pelle and I were moving too fast for them to join in in English, mirroring my experience of the dull transport conversation.  My mother, on the other hand, who now speaks English more easily than Swedish, found the ideas too fast moving rather than the language.

On this occasion my priority was not to practice my Swedish, but to enjoy a rich conversation with my cousin on something we are both quite passionate about.  Therefore, I was translanguaging in using my full linguistic repertoire to communicate effectively in that context.  However, I had not forgotten my resolve to use English and at various points in the evening I used language that I had that was appropriate. At the end of the evening as we were getting our coats one of my aunts said “Tack för i kväll” [thank you for this evening].  This is a phrase that I recognised from some point in the past, so, despite having spoken a lot of English that evening, I left my cousin saying, “Tack för i kväll”.

In all the previous examples a mixture of Swedish and English has been used to communicate, in order to form a bridge between speakers of different named languages, although, generally, my Swedish relatives speak much better English than I do Swedish.  However, there were two specific instances where this was not the case.  One of my cousins did her PhD in Lausanne in English and I have a second cousin whose mother was Australian and who was brought up bilingual and had lived for extended periods in both Rwanda and Australia before returning to Sweden.  In conversation with both these people the idea of speaking Swedish was irrelevant in terms of communication.  It would have limited what we could discuss, and it would only have had value for me as practicing my Swedish and I had already done plenty of that.

So how does this relate to the students that I teach?

For a long time now, I have felt that the political aspect of translanguaging is important, that students from different backgrounds should be able to express themselves and that their language and culture should never be deemed invalid.  However, I also consider the scaffolding potential of translanguaging really important for language learners.  While these two perspectives may seem to be in opposition, I don’t think that they need to be.

The use of translanguaging to fill gaps in vocabulary, such as my oatmilk, allows communication to continue flowing without the necessity of looking up words.  I also feel that “noticing” is a key skill, I am not sure if I would have attempted to notice the words impeding my understanding, if I had not so frequently told students that noticing is important for them.

The evening at Pelle’s when my aunts and my mother experienced different barriers to joining the conversation mirrors the problems that our students often encounter in terms of gauging whether their difficulties are in understanding concepts in English, or understanding those concepts in themselves.

If students revert to their L1 when speaking to someone who shares that L1, isn’t that just a case of those students making best use of their whole linguistic repertoire in that particular context?  However, if students wish to work in international contexts as suggested by studying at a UK university, then translanguaging should offer students the possibility of practicing their English without feeling conscious of the “named language” (Canagarajah 2018) being less than perfect or of using alternatives when there are gaps in vocabulary.  It is for individual students to decide in any given context whether practicing English is more important than ease of communication.

 

References

• Canagarajah, S. (2018). "Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm beyond Structuralist Orientations." Applied linguistics 39(1): 31-54.
• Canals, L. (2021). "Multimodality and translanguaging in negotiation of meaning." Foreign language annals 54(3): 647-670.
• Fang, F. and Y. Liu (2020). "‘Using all English is not always meaningful’: Stakeholders’ perspectives on the use of and attitudes towards translanguaging at a Chinese university." Lingua 247: 102959.
• García, O. and R. Otheguy (2020). "Plurilingualism and translanguaging: commonalities and divergences." International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23(1): 17-35.
• Holmes, P. and I. Hinchliffe (1997). Swedish : an essential grammar. London, Routledge.
• Tai, K. W. H. and L. Wei (2020). "Bringing the outside in: Connecting students’ out-of-school knowledge and experience through translanguaging in Hong Kong English Medium Instruction mathematics classes." System (Linköping) 95: 102364.
• Wang, W. and X. L. Curdt-Christiansen (2019). "Translanguaging in a Chinese–English bilingual education programme: a university-classroom ethnography." International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism 22(3): 322-337.