Newly arrived students and translanguaging – epistemological challenges
A central aim of the paper is to explore methodological and theoretical challenges of translanguaging in education for newly arrived immigrants in Sweden. The concept of translanguaging has emerged from a growing interest in multilingualism and multilingual education during the last two decades, especially in the Global North, which was previously — and to a large extent still is — dominated by monolingual norms. Translanguaging offers a challenging and expansive conceptual lens for understanding the linguistically hybrid yet fluid meaning-making practices of multilinguals (Garcia & Wei 2014; Creese & Blackledge 2010; 2015). It highlights the capacity of bi- and multilinguals to make themselves understood and produce nuanced meanings by gliding between languages so that they use a variety of features and practices from their whole linguistic repertoires. Such communicative mobility on the basis of all a speaker’s linguistic resources has significant promise for gaining opportunity to contribute to instructional processes and collaborate with other students so that (language) learning is maximized (Creese & Blackledge, 2010). . At the same time, tendencies in research on translanguaging stand in need of critical assessment. Translinguists insistence on a single integrated linguistic system supporting multilingual communication and the deconstruction of named languages (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015) raises the question of the role of grammatical systematicity in language learning and how language retains coherent meanings or determinable meaning potentials across different contexts. Rather than accounting for translanguagers’ interaction in terms of individual repertoires and competence, participants collaborative interactional work also has to be inspected to understand aspects of translanguaging. By drawing on empirical examples from two ethnographic studies of language support for newly arrived students in subject learning from Swedish schools, we critically explore the potential of translanguaging.