Translanguaging as Flows: The Process Turn in Applied Linguistics
by Professor Angel M.Y. Lin
The renowned social semiotician, scientist, and educator Jay Lemke (2018) asks,
Suppose the real is not what is, but what happens. How do we talk about the systems we belong to in terms of processes and flows, their entanglements and emergent patternings on multiple timescales? How should we talk about “Languages” in these terms, if at all? Suppose learning is not a change in what we know, but in how we entangle ourselves in the flows of people and things? In “translanguaging events” (TL), we joke, we evoke feelings, we re-connect with others, we alter our entanglements, and we learn. What sorts of changes happen along trajectories of TL events that would not be likely (or possible) with only “mono-languaging” (ML)? … Our theories about language and learning embody many ML assumptions. How do we escape them? And what can replace them, to the benefit of those whom the ML dogmas disparage, deprecate, and dispossess?
The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed the beginning of the ‘process ontological turn’ in Applied Linguistics, which demands us to radically revisit and rethink our long-received notions of individualist, separate substance-based notions of learning, teaching, and ‘acquisition’ of languages as separate entities. Process and relational ontology (Whitehead, 1978) demands us to think of learning as flows and entanglement: ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’ (Barad, 2007; see also Smythe et al., 2017). In this presentation, I discuss the implications of these new perspectives for language education through analysing translanguaging and trans-semiotizing (Lin 2013) processes in the classroom.
Angel M. Y. Lin received her doctoral degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, in 1996. Since then her research and teaching have focused on classroom discourse analysis, bilingual and multilingual education, academic literacies, language across the curriculum (LAC), Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and language policy and planning in postcolonial contexts. She has published six research books and over 100 research articles, and serves on the editorial boards of international research journals including Applied Linguistics, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Language and Education. In January 2018, Angel Lin took up the prestigious position of Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Plurilingual and Intercultural Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada.
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