Seltzer.2019.Critical Translingual Approach
Seltzer.2019.Critical Translingual Approach
Seltzer.2019.Critical Translingual Approach
This article adds to the growing body of literature that calls for shifts
in teachers’ and researchers’ stance and practice toward a re-seeing
and re-hearing of students for their linguistic assets and expertise. By
taking up the theory of translanguaging (Garcıa, 2009; Garcıa & Li
Wei, 2014) to understand students’ language practices, I trouble the
labels and terms so often assigned to language minoritized students,
particularly those that fall into the larger categories of “home” and
“school” language. To do this, I draw on data collected during a year-
long ethnographic study of an 11th-grade English language arts class-
room in New York City. This study took up what I term a critical
translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019), engaging language minoritized
students—bilingual students as well as those students traditionally
viewed as monolingual—in metalinguistic conversations, literacy activ-
ities, and writing that delved into the role language played in their
identities and lived experiences. By centering students’ talk and writ-
ing about their own languages, this article serves as a call to educa-
tors and researchers to relinquish conceptualizations of “standard” or
“native” language and to embrace those that foster students’ critical
integration of new features into their existing linguistic repertoires.
doi: 10.1002/tesq.530
After working closely with Ms. Winter to develop the outline of the
yearlong curriculum, I took on the role of participant-observer in her
classroom in fall 2015. In this role, I looked for evidence of how Ms.
Winter was translating her professional learning into her practice and
how students were engaging with the curriculum we had co-designed.
I observed Ms. Winter’s four classroom sections approximately three
times per week from September 2015 to June 2016. Starting in Octo-
ber, I audio recorded and transcribed classroom sessions to document
3
For more information about the CUNY-NYSIEB project, see Garcıa and Kleyn (2016).
Yessica: I think it’s possible not to write about yourself. Like, there’s people who
would want to be another person, so they would try to change
everything up. They would probably talk proper English and
everything. If your goal is to not put anything about you [in your
writing], that would happen eventually. You just have to focus on it.
[Ms. Winter acknowledges her point and moves on to another student.
Yessica says quietly to me, “I would switch up everything. My name’s
not Yessica, it’s Jane.” I laugh a little, and she says, without smiling,
“I’m serious.”] (Classroom transcript and field notes, 3/17/16)
Amir, whose family is from Yemen, articulated a similar reticence to
tell his own story during an interview about his college essay, in which
he had used “only standard English.” During that interview, I asked
Amir whether he would include any of his other language practices,
which he had identified as “a little bit of Arabic” and “lots of slang
and AAVE”:
Amir: I wouldn’t talk about my identity like that. I wouldn’t give them my
identity. I wouldn’t use some words. Like some words in AAVE? Yeah, I
wouldn’t take a risk. I’d try to write standard academic English.
Kate: And when you say you wouldn’t give them your identity—
Amir: Yeah. I don’t wanna talk about myself. And my background and stuff.
Kate: Why not?
Amir: I feel like . . . they don’t need to know that stuff. (Student interview, 6/
7/16)
Present in Yessica’s and Amir’s words is an understanding that
school languaging (described as “standard” and “proper” English),
rather than those language practices more closely linked to their iden-
tities, can serve as a shield against the kind of marginalizing percep-
tions students experience as a result of their home languaging. Using
this kind of school language, then, was a way of avoiding a “risk” and
even becoming “another person,” which enables students like Yessica
and Amir to keep their “stories” and their “identities” to themselves
Adam: She said not to use slang or other language practices [in my essay].
Just be professional.
Ms. Winter: And what did you say to that?
Adam: Um, I agreed with her.
Ms. Winter: You agreed with her? So in your essay you’re not going to take
any risks?
Adam: I just wanna get out. (Classroom transcript, 5/20/16)
Similar to Yessica and Amir, Adam seems to be expressing that the
use of “professional” language practices (which align ideologically with
school language practices) and the avoidance of linguistic risks in his
writing is a necessary step to “getting out.” In this way, the use of
school languaging is actually the way out of school, not a way to gain
further access to the academic or professional realm, as it is typically
communicated to students. By taking up the language practices associ-
ated with these realms, then, Adam paves his way out of high school
(perhaps toward college, though it was not clear where “getting out”
might lead) without taking the linguistic risks associated with other
home language practices.
Jacqui: I just use my regular language. I don’t switch it up. Like, the
language I use in school, I talk the same way I talk to my friends. Like
to convince them, like, “you have to go to school!” I don’t know, it
sticks with me. It stays with me. Like before, I used to talk very loud,
cursing every other sentence, using slang, but now I don’t use as much
as before. Cause, alright, when you’re learning English, all these words
you learn, they eventually stay in your head and you use them. So that
becomes your new language. (Classroom transcript, 3/14/16)
Jacqui links her use of school language to the process of growing
up and maturing. Though she “used to talk” in a different way, the
language she learned in school—specifically in English class—has
“stayed” with her. Though her statement could be read as an apparent
internalization of those raciolinguistic ideologies that render her lan-
guage practices “inappropriate” (being “loud,” “cursing,” and using
“slang”), I struggled to code it as such. Jacqui spoke about her “new
language” with pride, connecting it with her role as a motivator, urg-
ing her friends to go to school. When Jacqui expressed that school
language had come to feel like her “regular” language, it felt reductive
to assume she is merely a subject of such ideologies.
A contradiction also emerged in Faith’s metacommentary. Faith, a
young Latina woman, set herself apart from her peers through her lan-
guage practices. She self-identified as a poet whose “high vocabulary
standards” put her on the receiving end of judgment from two differ-
ent sets of listeners: white listening subjects and members of her own
family and community. As we can see in the following two excerpts,
Faith’s description of her language practices and her attitude toward
her potential audience is highly complex:
Faith: When you read my poetry, even my own family, like my mother or my
cousin, they feel like . . . they can’t relate. Not in the sense that they
don’t know what I’m talking about, but . . . they feel like my writing is
. . . white. Like I read it to my mom and she sits there, for a good, like,
2 minutes after, analyzing everything, and she goes, “Why you talk like
that? You not writing an essay.” And that’s—that’s where I’m most
comfortable, writing poetry. There’s some poems where I have curses and
it comes off as—people could read it and think it’s a rap. But [with
other poems] there’s people who get offended, like, “Oh, you’re not
writing to us, you can’t relate to us.” (Classroom transcript, 4/11/16)
Faith: I feel like, me personally, I could really care less about the white
audience. Cause that’s not my audience. I don’t relate to the white—to
She will usually say, “A na get natin fi gi ou, na educashin nimir a get
so larn Englesh.” (I do not have anything to give you but education so
learn English.)
Kate: If you were to submit a more traditional essay to a college, once you got
in would you consider taking more risks in your writing? Or do you
think you would—
Eva: No, I think I would take some risks.
Kate: Once you got in.
Eva: Yeah. I got in, they can’t tell me not to! (Student interview, 6/7/16)
Osvaldo talked through a similar strategy. Though at first he might
not bring those language practices associated with home into his
school writing, he might do so once he had established himself:
Osvaldo: Say, my first book I’m gonna write, I’ll try to get [my audience], like,
accommodated with me. Slowly but surely I get followers, and then
after a while, I write my second book. I add my language practices
and they would be psyched to read it ’cause they read my first book
first and they’ll think it’s still good, even with my [other] language
IMPLICATIONS
The first implication of students’ metacommentary is for classroom
practice and for educators who, in particular, teach the named lan-
guage of English to language-minoritized students. All the students I
worked with in this study were keenly aware of how their own language
practices were heard by others and how the perceptions of those lis-
teners impacted their lives. Educators’ awareness of such sophisticated
understandings about language is highly important, because it offers a
new framing of these students as “gifted sociolinguists” (Flores, 2015)
rather than as “English language learners,” “struggling” or “at risk” stu-
dents, or any of the other labels placed on them. This awareness also
offers an entry point for engaging, authentic classroom learning.
Rather than approach the teaching of language and literacy from the
point of view of remediation, teachers can tap into students’ translin-
gual sensibilities, ushering in innovative and creative ways of thinking
about and using language.
A second implication of this work is for those tasked with teacher
preparation across fields such as bilingual, TESOL, and English lan-
guage arts education. If we approach the teaching of English from an
external, named language perspective, we reify those myths and mis-
conceptions that accompany it: that achieving the status of “native
speaker” is the ultimate language learning goal (or is even possible);
that English can be learned in isolation from other language practices;
that monolingual, monodialectical speakers of “standard English” are
the norm (Garcıa, 2014). Instead, teacher educators can take up a crit-
ical translingual approach that actively challenges these notions that
are based not in linguistic fact but in ideology and encourages future
teachers to do the same through the design of curricula and
THE AUTHOR
REFERENCES
Alim, H. S. (2005). Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting
issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher,
34(7), 24–31. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X034007024.