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Kirti Kapur
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Laura B. Liu
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The articles in this newsletter highlight need to foster societal perspectives, teaching practices, and language policies that reflect the multilingual realities of learners and families served by education systems around the world. Each of these articles challenges a particular linguistic ideology, shaped by particular social, historical, political, and economic conditions. The first article (Quirk et al.) challenges bilingual education policies that compartmentalize language, without recognizing the fluidity with which bilingual families engage language and maintain blended linguistic identities in their homes. This article recognizes that multilingual education must be grounded in a foundational respect for learner identity and family relationships, which are central to language development. The second article (Ascenzi-Moreno) challenges the Science of Reading (SOR) movement in that it promotes literacy development that primarily supports English language speakers, while bi/multilingual learners and their linguistic strengths and needs, are not addressed or even seen. This article highlights the importance of developing literacy skills in ways that honor bilingual learners and the unique ways in which they learn to read, such as learning word meaning before word sound, or comparing sounds across languages. The third article (Gerald) challenges standardized English as the status quo, and recognizes the limitations that this imposes on all individuals to participate in society with their full linguistic identities and repertoires. This article recognizes the need to celebrate diverse perspectives, voices, and languages in academia, as well as society more broadly. The fourth article (Henner) challenges the culture of captioning to consider and respect the captioning needs of both bi/multilingual and Deaf communities, globally. This article claims that centering disability and multimodality in languaging is a social Justice issue in multilingual contexts.
Together, these articles challenge societal, pedagogical, and political status quo views on language. Rather, these articles reflect the linguistic ideology of transglossia, defined by García (2009) as a “stable, and yet dynamic, communicative network with many languages in functional interrelationship” (p. 79). This dynamic communicative network recognizes linguistic identity as fluid, and sees language as a site of agency, resistance, and solidarity (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). Language is active, always moving and changing. In this newsletter, monolingual ideologies are examined alongside multilingual ideologies. We extend our gratitude to each of the authors for contributing to this shared publication!
References
Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Pavlenko, A., and Blackledge, A. (eds.) (2004). Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon.
Kirti Kapur is a Professor of English at NCERT, New Delhi, India. As a Fulbright Fellow 2021, she conducted research in multicultural education and TESOL at Hawaii Pacific University, USA. Her areas of work are the development of syllabi, textual materials, comparative research, and teachers’ handbooks. She has led over 100+ teacher training workshops across all stages of school education. She has contributed to over 90 papers (national and international) on cultural contexts and language learning. She has trained teachers from Afghanistan, Tibet, and Mauritius on making ELT effective and learner-centric in their context.
Laura B. Liu is an assistant professor of teacher education and English as a New Language program coordinator at Indiana University Columbus. Her key research areas focus on glocalization, diversity sustaining teaching practices, and international teacher professional development. Laura also served as faculty at Beijing Normal University’s Center for Teacher Education Research (2014-2015) where her postdoctoral work focused on teacher education faculty international professional development. |
