Keynote Speaker
Sender Dovchin
Curtin University, Australia
April 20th 10:50-11:50
The Ordinariness of Translanguaging and its Implications for ELT
Recent debates in bi/multilingual studies have problematised some paradigms, such as codeswitching for reifying static language boundaries and for their inability to account for creative communicative practices. Instead, translanguaging has been re-introduced to capture the critical ‘languaging’ practices, which reflects the fluid movement between and across languages. Yet, this emerging tradition still tends to celebrate and thus exoticize the presumed linguistic creativity, although it is indeed ‘quite normal’ and ‘ordinary’ and by no means a new phenomenon. In so doing, scholarship inadvertently constructs a linguistic Other whose translanguaging is expected to be made legible according to normative epistemologies of diversity.
This presentation is based on the premise that the analytic potential of bi/multilingual studies can be enhanced through a stronger focus on translanguaging as a reflective of everyday, mundane, and ordinary occurrences rather than of exotic, eccentric or unconventional ones. Translanguaging is neither to celebrate nor to deplore but something to observe and examine with interest like anything else. I conclude, following Higgins and Coen (2000, pp. 14-15), ‘we accept that as Homo sapiens, we are all the same in terms of genetic structure and cognitive potentiality … Beyond that, we do not think that as humans we have anything in common but our differences …’ Translanguaging is rather ordinary – a necessary condition of linguistic ordinariness is its creativity.
We, as TESOL educators, therefore, need to consider two critical ELT implications: (1) how English language learning students use different linguistic repertoires outside the classroom, what they talk about, and which agencies they prefer to express in which forms of their linguistic repertoire; and their multiple activities and practices embedded within their multiple ways of learning, being, and speaking.
Dovchin, S. (2017). The ordinariness of youth linguascapes in Mongolia. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(2), 144-159.
Higgins, M. J., & Coen, T. L. (2000). Streets, bedrooms, and patios: The ordinariness of diversity in urban Oaxaca. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press
Biodata
Professor Sender Dovchin is a Senior Principal Research Fellow and a former Director of Research at the School of Education, Curtin University. She is a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow of an Australian Research Council (ARC). Her ARC project focuses on empowering vulnerable youth in Australia by combatting linguistic racism. The project aims to investigate how culturally and linguistically diverse young Australians experience discrimination in their daily lives because of how they speak. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the Centre for Language Research, The University of Aizu, Japan. She has also been awarded Young Scientist (Kakenhi) by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She completed her PhD and MA degrees in language education at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Professor Dovchin was an Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. She was identified as “Top Researcher in the field of Language & Linguistics” under The Humanities, Arts & Literature of The Australian's 2021 Research Magazine and Top 250 Researchers in Australia in 2021.
Her research pragmatically contributes to the second language education of young generation living in the peripheries, providing a pedagogical view to accommodate the multiple co-existences of linguistic diversity in a globalized world. She has authored articles in top-tier international peer-reviewed journals, such as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, System, TESOL Quarterly, International Journal of Multilingualism, World Englishes, Asian Englishes, English Today, International Journal Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, International Journal of Multilingual Research, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, International Journal Bilingualism, Ethnicities, Multilingua, Linguistics and Education, among others. She has authored seven books with international publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Multilingual Matters. Professor Dovchin has had notable research funding success, including five international and national research grants as the lead and co-investigator.