Abstract
I want to start by thanking you for making yourself available to chat with me. You have had an extensive career working with language minority students and conducting research on bilingual education. How have your own experiences as an immigrant shaped your perspective and commitment to this field of study? Thank you, Huseyin, for talking to me! It is always wonderful to talk to young scholars who are interested in arranging these interviews
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and to think about how language and language education can help transform the ways in which we relate to each other, especially during this very difficult time that we are living through. So, I think all the work that we ever do relates to who we are. And my commitment to the education of language-minoritized students stems from my own experience as someone who arrived in New York City from Cuba at the age of 11 and lived in a bilingual community, in a bilingual family and had to go through school with the difficulties that it brings, and then became a teacher and saw how language was not used to leverage what the students brought. In the 1960s, in New York City, there was not a large immigrant group. There was a large Puerto Rican population who are US citizens. And yet, as a colony, they were treated exactly the same way that you can expect of any other immigrant or of students of African American descent. Nothing had been thought about as far as adapting instruction to their needs so that they could understand what was going on in the classroom. So, I always say that I started experimenting with bilingual education before there was a movement to really institutionalize bilingual education. That is the work that I have continued to do throughout my long career. I can tell you that in the beginning it was hard to in some ways foreground my personal experience, because as you start studying, you study your own experience from a very external perspective, not from an internal perspective, not through what you feel, not through what you see, not through what you think about all the time in your own life because you think that the work of others is more valid than yours, that they are seeing more. But I was trained as a sociolinguist by probably the best sociolinguist in the world, Joshua A. Fishman. I always say that everything I know about language I learned from Joshua Fishman. But I also saw that there was a tension between the sociolinguistic theories that I was studying and the life of bilinguals that I lived with. So, I saw that as a conflict. And I must say it took me a very long time to free myself and have the courage to say, “Well, this does not quite fit my reality or the reality of people that I work with.” That takes courage. I think the young people today are doing much better than we old scholars did. I think that it took us a very long time to really start theorizing from our own experiences instead of that of others. And I am always grateful to young people because I think they have moved the conversation forward with courage and honesty. In your research, you have explored the concept of translanguaging, which challenges traditional views of bilingualism. Could you share an example from your work that illustrates the power of translanguaging in the classroom and its impact on students’ language development? I can tell you that, all throughout my experience, I was troubled by the way that bilingualism was defined. And because the idea was always that of elite bilingualism, of one language added to a second language, and none of that made any sense to me personally. For example, I know that the language that I learned first was Spanish, but that it may not be my L1 in any kind of way. It is not the language that I use the most. It is not the language that I write in for the most part of my life. So, you know, what is an L1 and what is an L2? So, I knew that this did not make sense. I knew that diglossia did not make sense. The idea that you only use one language with certain functions and in certain spaces and the other language in the other, and that was the only way that a stable bilingual society could be maintained … That did not make any sense to me because in my community, those separations in my home, that did not happen. I was the oldest of four children, one of whom was born in the United States. The other one was only 1 year old when he came. So, both languages coexisted in my home at the same time. All of these ideas that there is one language spoken at home and one language spoken outside did not make any sense to me, except as a system of control in some ways, as keeping that minoritized language in certain domains that were inferior or not as valuable as the other language. So, none of that made any sense to me. But I lived with it, and I went along with things. I think it was not until basically the turn of the century, I would say, there was always opposition to bilingual education, especially after Reagan was elected in 1980 and the attack started. But it was in 2000 when things sort of came to a head. I think the bilingual educators retreated and what came forth was this idea of dual language. In many ways, that reinforced even more this idea of language separation and the idea that both languages had to be separated in some crazy way that did not respond to the way that it worked in society, or to the way that people felt about those two languages. I was sitting in a classroom one day … I think it was in fourth grade. I remember the child who said to me for the first time, “Spanish runs through my heart, but English rules my veins,” or something like that. But the minute he said that, we had been sitting in a classroom where the policy was that one language was used one week, and the other language was used the other week. And I thought, “this does not make any sense” because for this child, this is always one system. It is all connected. I think the way that I came to translanguaging was basically from giving myself the freedom to see without first having to go through a theoretical lens. That is why, all my life, I said, “theoretical frameworks would help, but you have to make sure that they do not obfuscate your lenses.” Sometimes if you have one theoretical frame, then you only see through that lens. And you have to really clean those lenses and make sure that you observe very intently, and you observe clearly, and that you give yourself the freedom to really say what it is that you are seeing without having to then appeal to another scholar, usually a white male older scholar who would justify or validate what you are seeing. So, it took a long time. But I think it came from the ground up. It came from the experience in concert with what I had already studied. I do not think the idea that you see something different validates the fact that you have a foundational understanding of how things are perceived by others. How would you address the concerns of individuals who view translanguaging as a potential obstacle to achieving optimal language proficiency for language learners? What strategies or evidence-based practices can you recommend in order to bridge the gap between the concept of translanguaging and the goal of fostering full social and economic participation through language education? Let me first talk about language proficiency. I think the issue is that we have really produced concepts of language proficiency that are so artificial. I do not know where they came from. You say, “What is the cutoff score for this category?” The cutoff score is something that some of the psychometricians have been working on, but it is completely artificial. So, I think that is where the Council of Europe got it right when they started talking about plurilingualism. I think that they then went beyond it and maybe did not get that right. But I think the idea of plurilingualism is an important one. It is the idea that you do not have to have full proficiency in two or three languages, but you have to have functional ways of using the language depending on the situation you are in. The idea that there is an absolute language proficiency is an artificial construct that has been developed through standards that, again, have been artificially and externally produced without taking into account what the standards of bilinguals are. I believe in what the Martinican philosopher, Édouard Glissant, said about opacities. He said that to really understand opacities, you cannot just focus on one part or on the other part, you have to focus on the weave. So, the question is not “How does this child do this task in English or in Spanish, or in Arabic or in Chinese?” It is “How does this child use their full language repertoire to make sense and to make meaning?” I think that is what is important. If we focused on that, instead of language proficiency as an individual construct, if we focused on language proficiency, not a specific proficiency in these constructs that we have artificially built as language proficiency, but if we focused on what the person is doing, what the student is doing in motion as they interact, as they enact their meaning-making systems, that is what language proficiency is to me. It is the weave. How do we weave together all our resources, all our linguistic multimodal histories, experiences, and cultural practices? How do we weave them together to make meaning of the experience that we are having at this moment? That, to me, is language proficiency, not the concept of language proficiency that we have been working on. Now, if you then think about that, how do you get students there? How do you get students to use language meaningfully to learn, to make sense of their lives, to have meaning? You do that by making sure that they can use all their resources. The idea that you constrain students so that they cannot use all their resources is odd. I am sometimes in classrooms where books in one language are on one side, and books in the other language on the other side. The kids can never use both books because there are supposed to be separate sides, separate teachers, separate rooms, separate days, et cetera. That does not make sense. If you have resources, why not use them? I think that is where the question of “why?” is important. Why is it that we are not giving all children the freedom to use all their resources so that they can learn? You talk about social and economic participation. I will talk about little children first because my work is mostly with little children. The only way that they can participate in classrooms is if they are heard, if they feel that they have something to contribute. A child that is constrained so that they cannot use all their resources, but only half of their repertoire, less than half of their repertoire … First of all, it is so unfair because monolingual children have access to almost all their repertoire, right? Now, these children have access only to a very small part of their repertoire. But second of all, the only way to really engage them is to allow them the same freedom that you give everybody, the same equality of treatment that they do deserve so that they can use all their resources. Now, that presents challenges for teachers, for educators, but the challenges are there, and we cannot ignore them. Our classrooms are multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial, multilingual, wherever you are. It does not matter what type of education you are doing. Whether it is in monolingual or bilingual or CLIL [Content and Language Integrated Learning] or structured immersion or immersion, whatever the term you call it, it does not matter. These children have very different practices, even when you think of them as being monolingual. They have very different linguistic, cultural, and historical practices. So, I always say that translanguaging to me is not strategies. I think that translanguaging in education is the idea that you acknowledge the translanguaging that takes place in minority communities, that you acknowledge the practices that take place in these racialized communities. And then you can ask how you leverage them in a classroom so that everybody learns. By the way, this does not only foster the learning of students who are linguistically minoritized. I think that it is really very important, you know, and especially in a time like we are living right now. The idea that education is just for efficiency is so absurd because education has to be for us to relate to each other as human beings and for us to learn from each other. So, what I am saying about translanguaging is that it is not only valid and important for the language-minoritized child, or whatever you want to call that child, it is important for all of us. It is as important for white English-speaking majorities as it is for Latinos in the United States or anybody anywhere else. This is important because the goal of education has to be to grow us as human beings and full human beings. If you think about language, not from the perspective that we have been taught to think about it, but if you think of the perspective of language from the human point of view, the way that biologists like Maturana and Varela have taught us to think about it, then you know that it is a communicative system that all human beings have access to and that is equally distributed everywhere. So translanguaging cannot be a strategy. Translanguaging has to be a way of opening up these translanguaging spaces in which everybody is given the freedom to use all the resources. In so doing, we open space for each other to relate in ways that are not monolithic but are heteroglossic in a lot of ways. What are the current trends of using translanguaging as a lens in language assessment research to create equitable spaces for multilingual students who are identified as English Learners (ELs)? What are the needed areas of research that need to be informed by the body of research that uses translanguaging? I think assessment is usually the most difficult to move. I think that instructional practices are moving because teachers are in classrooms, and no matter what they are told, they have to engage with the children. So, many of them may not even believe in it, but they are willing to try it because they know that they have to engage with the children somehow and they have to make that instruction meaningful. I think assessment is more difficult because it is usually external. I think formative assessment is easily done if teachers get away from the idea that language proficiency is simply the performance with certain specific linguistic features; instead, think of proficiency as the ability to manage, to orchestrate, to assemble all your linguistic resources. The linguistic for me, is much more than just the language. It is also everything else that comes around it. If they change that definition, then I think while creating formative assessments, teachers will always think of the weave, not just of the components. I think that is very important. Now, standardized normative assessment that is done completely externally is more difficult to change. And yet I really think that I will not see it, but your generation will see a different type of assessment because technology and AI are helping with this. They are transforming the ways in which we think of how to assess language or knowledge or any of this. I think that eventually we are going to see changes in the testing industry as far as standardized assessments are concerned. I have begun to see them and see that psychometricians think of consequential validity, for example, as more important than anything else. They are thinking of questions like what the differences between different groups are, and how we keep it equal and create simulated classrooms so that teachers have choices that they make. I think all the new technology is going to help us with assessment. And until then, I think the only thing we can always say is to make sure that teachers know that children are much more than a score, and that we teach teachers to observe them deeply, and that we teach them to trust their own judgments and to describe what it is that the child needs to know and do in motion as they engage, rather than the static score that captures a child in a completely decontextualized situation, where it is difficult to assess the whole child. So, I think teachers have a lot of power to make sure that administrators understand that this child's score may be a number. But if you have been observing and recording what the child does, and you can then show that, “Look! This child scores this way, but on such and such an occasion, this is what he or she did,” and demonstrate what it is that children are doing. I think that would go a long way. What strategies or policies do you believe could help address the issue of extended reclassification of ELs in US public schools, ensuring that these students are not held back by prolonged language support services while still receiving the necessary assistance for their academic success? First of all, I think we have to question the category. All categories are artificial constructs that we sometimes have to have in order to administer schools. But we have to remember, as scholars and thinkers, that these categories are flawed. Because I have met—I am sure you have, too—many students who are categorized as Long-Term English Learners (LTELs) and yet speak nothing but English. It cannot be right. So, these categories are flawed in some ways. Many times, they are students who speak only English, and yet their reading and writing might not be up to par. And that is why they are still in that category. But that has nothing to do with being an EL. That has to do with many reasons. It has to do sometimes with inconsistent placement or their having moved back and forth. It has to do with very poor schooling. It would happen even if a child was completely monolingual in the fifth grade. So, I think that the first thing that has to be done is that the category has to be questioned. That is very important. Again, I hate to talk about strategies because then people think, “if you do this strategy, you are solving the problem.” The problems are larger than just strategies. They are problems of poverty, problems of inconsistent education, problems of poor schooling, problems of reading instruction that is not meaning-making in any kind of way, problems of non-engagement with the children, or problems of racism. They are all the kinds of issues of why a child might not be a competent reader or writer in the sixth grade. That is usually what happens. They have gone through elementary school as ELs, and then they go to middle school, and they still have not been reclassified. They remain ELs. So, I think that the answer to all of these questions is always the same: better schooling, better feeding, better health systems, more support for parents, more support for mothers. We are living in a society where mothers are working, and there is very little child support. So, tutoring afterschool programs and all these things would help because any type of program that engages children in school, that makes the school a less alienating institution and makes the school an institution, a place where children feel welcomed, I think that helps with all types of academic issues. Because if you feel welcomed, if you feel interested, you will find ways of belonging. And belonging in schools usually has to do with reading and writing. I think this is what I would say that has to happen. More imaginative teaching rather than remedial teaching … We have a tendency, when children are classified in any kind of way, to make them feel like there is a deficit, which is what the classification as an EL does. The solution we have as educators is to do remedial accelerated teaching of linguistic features, and this is going to help them. I really believe that the only thing that could help a sixth grader or a middle-school child who has been unengaged from school and therefore continues to be classified as an EL is to be engaged in an imaginative curriculum, a curriculum that values who they are, that values what they bring, that understands their needs, and that tries not to fill those gaps—which is the way that we usually do it—but rather engages them in learning from what it is that they bring and expanding their experience. I think for that, a curriculum that is imaginative, that is linked to the community experience, that is not just the school curriculum, and that brings in their own histories and their own experiences is what is going to make them interested in schools. I have a middle-school granddaughter that does not like to read. If she were classified as an LTEL today, you have to find ways to help her. She is not going to read a text that my other grandchildren do. But she will read, for example, graphic novels about certain topics that she is interested in. That is where you have to start. You have to start by giving them the support which some educators have been very critical of in recent times. You have to give them the usual support they need. Why not? Anyway, just thinking of the idea that education is much more than what schools do, education has to encompass the community and the experiences. Traditional tracking and ability grouping in education can often perpetuate inequalities. How can the practice of translanguaging provide a means to liberate students from the constraints of these systems, allowing them to harness the full potential of their linguistic and cognitive abilities, regardless of their language background or proficiency? Categories and tracking are always soothing for adults because we think we have it under control. All of us who have worked in schools know that there is tremendous variation among the children, even when you track narrowly. This variation has to be acknowledged. Then, you also have to think of the impact of labels and what they do to children. I may have been the victim of labeling because so long ago, that was certainly what was done in the United States. Therefore, when I went to high school, I was put in the slow group. But I must say, in the second year of high school, I had a teacher who saw the potential in what I was thinking and what I was doing and advocated for me. So, they moved me up. So, tracking has the effect of putting students in categories that limit their potential because the whole ethos of education is to remediate. I remember my English courses were all about teaching grammar and we may have read something, but it was all about “Who did this? What did they do? When did they do it?” Whereas when I was put in the more advanced class, I realized what they were doing with books was thinking of “What would you have done if you were so and so? What other options should this character have had?” So, the questions that were being asked were completely different. So, that is a problem with tracking. First of all, it is impossible to have a homogeneous classroom of any kind. And secondly, in a linear kind of way, we need to understand that in every task we do, we engage differently. So, I may be very slow if you give me a task that has to do with technology, for example, because of my age. And yet, I may be very fast in writing something that someone who is wonderful in technology does not have. So that is a problem. Now, what translanguaging does is to create space in which people can use all their very different resources to make meaning of what it is that they are learning, then that space becomes more multidimensional. And maybe—I am not saying for sure because it is not the answer to everything—we will give some students the opportunity to work through this category in which they have been put, and maybe they will also give the educator the opportunity to see an opportunity to help them do something different from what the curriculum is asking them to have the students do. So, I think the concept of space is what is important, not the strategy, but opening up that space in which students can use all their resources and therefore gives the opportunity and the space to the educator to see them differently because they are performing the same task, but with different resources. In your book Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, you challenge traditional notions of language separation. How do you envision the future of education if more teachers and schools adopt a translanguaging approach? I think I told you that I just came back from Taiwan. One thing that is very interesting to me is how the Western world has had to grapple with translanguaging because we started with definitions of language, monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism that saw languages as entities that were innumerable and separate. When you travel to the East—including South Africa, some African countries, and some Asian countries too—their perspective on multilingualism is completely different. It is not these “different languages,” but it is what people do with all these resources that have been named “different languages,” but that are sort of inside. Sometimes you ask them, “What is it that you speak?” and they cannot even tell you because those named languages are such external categories that are not theirs. What I want to say is that it is interesting that the Western world is grappling with translanguaging, whereas the East starts with translanguaging. I was just in Taiwan where the schools that offer some sort of bilingual instruction are not hung up on having the kids do it all through English. They know that these kids are going to have to use, in this case, Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hakka or Hokkien or other indigenous languages and to work through English, and no one is afraid of it. They know that this eventually is going to lead to a more multilingual world. I often wonder, when I think back of my own experience … if I had been taught Chinese in the same way, that is, if my education had also included Chinese without asking me to do everything in Chinese, but just making me comfortable with it, I might still not speak Chinese perfectly, but I certainly would be able to say more than 你好 (nǐ hǎo). I think that this is a case in which the East, the Global South, is leading the Global North. This is actually very satisfying to me because I never expected it, but I see it coming. Your expertise and generous sharing of insights have been immensely valuable, and I truly appreciate the time you dedicated to our conversation. Thank you so much. No. Thank you, Huseyin. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak extemporaneously about things that I care about.
