9 - Complementary classrooms for multilingual minority ethnic children as a translanguaging space

Summary

Introduction

The term ‘translanguaging’ has recently been taken up by many researchers of multilingualism as an encompassing term for a variety of multilingual practices, traditionally termed as code-switching, code-mixing, borrowing and crossing, which are commonplace amongst multilingual language users. It has served as a corrective of the still widespread perception that such practices are somehow out of the ordinary, abnormal or deviant, by highlighting the positive and creative dimensions of the practices (see a review in García & Li Wei, 2014 ). In this chapter, I will examine the translanguaging practices of children of immigrant background in a specific socio-educational context as evidence of their creativity, criticality and multicompetence. The group of children I am focusing on in this chapter are those of Chinese ethnic origin in Britain. They are best described as transnationals: most of them are British-born, but many are of immigrant background, that is, their parents were born outside Britain; some of them have lived in other parts of the world. The specific context that I am studying is that of complementary schools, a voluntary education provision made available by minority ethnic, usually immigrant, communities in Britain to support their children's learning and use of the ethnic languages. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the pupils and their teachers, I want to argue that translanguaging has a transformative capacity, as it creates a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance, thereby making it into a lived experience. I have called this space ‘translanguaging space’, a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging (Li Wei, 2011 ). As we will see through the examples of the pupils’, and their teachers’, alternation between languages and between modes of communication (e.g. speaking and writing), the complementary schools for minority ethnic children in Britain provide just such a translanguaging space. Skills, knowledge and identities are acquired and developed through the act of translanguaging.