34.2058, Review: Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition: Bojsen, Daryai-Hansen, Holmen, Risager (2023)

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Subject: 34.2058, Review: Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition: Bojsen, Daryai-Hansen, Holmen, Risager (2023)

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Date: 26-Apr-2023
From: Evgeniia Iurinok [evgeniia.iurinok at upf.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition: Bojsen, Daryai-Hansen, Holmen, Risager (2023) 


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.368

EDITOR: Heidi Bojsen
EDITOR: Petra Daryai-Hansen
EDITOR: Anne Holmen
EDITOR: Karen Risager
TITLE: Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher
Education and Research
SERIES TITLE: Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Evgeniia Iurinok

SUMMARY
“Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education
and Research”, edited by Heidi Bojsen, Petra Saryai-Hansen, Anne
Holmen, and Karen Risager, represents a collection of several studies
mainly carried out in higher education contexts. It focuses on how
language education can benefit from translanguaging by acquiring new
knowledge through adapting different epistemologies. The volume
provides various types of data collected in different countries of the
world, including Denmark, Finland, Japan, Morocco, and the USA, and in
a non-educational context in Costa Rica. In the following review, I
will argue that the book is a valuable source of useful insights into
how translanguaging practices work in real educational settings,
specifically adopting a student’s perspective which can be of interest
for scholars, teachers and policy makers in language education, but
that it fails to do justice to the theoretical depth of the
phenomenon, its connection to epistemological decentring, and its
relation to previous research. Thus, the contribution of the volume
remains unclear in regard to what has already been done in this field
of study.
In Chapter 1, “Introduction: The Nexus of Translanguaging and
Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research”, the
editors underline that two notions of translanguaging and
epistemological decentring are considered in this volume “in
conversation with two major trends in modern research on language and
education” (p. 1), namely a focus on multilingualism and
epistemological decentring. They explain their interest in this topic
themselves as “a wish to ensure heuristic diversity and quality in
higher education and research” (p. 9). The purpose of the book
identified by the editors is “not to argue against one or the other
perception of language and language practice, but rather investigate
how movements, such as translanguaging, across these strongly held
distinctions of languages may or may not be tied up with
epistemological decentring in higher education and research” (p. 9).
They highlight the main points of the volume by summarizing the
chapters. They also describe the linguistic situation in universities
of Nordic countries, believing that “[their] context may help to call
attention to the characteristics of those localities where faculty,
staff and students are obliged to work in a foreign language
constantly or for certain tasks” (p. 13). Then they proceed by
explaining the Roskilde Language Profiles and the roles of essays
which numerous authors in the volume refer to in relation to the
purpose of the volume.
Chapter 2, “Translanguaging, Epistemological Decentring and power: A
study of students’ perspectives and Learning”, by Heidi Bojsen,
provides insights on what role translanguaging plays in
epistemological decentring in higher education. An analysis of various
types of data shows that language practices are determined by power
relations in higher education. The chapter argues that different
languages can be of benefit for promoting students’ critical view on
what epistemological decentring is.
In Chapter 3, “More Languages for More Students: Practice, Ideology
and Management”, Marta Kirilova, Anne Holmen, and Sanne Larsen focus
on the outcomes of the implementation of the programme “More Languages
for More Students” based on students, lectures, and management staff’s
perceptions. This chapter exemplifies how a language plan works in a
real educational context but is regarded controversially by
participants of the study, both positively and negatively.
Chapter 4, “Glimpses Into the ‘Language Galaxy’ of International
Universities: International Students’ Multilingual and Translanguaging
Experiences and Strategies at a Top Finnish University”, by Deborah
Charlotte Darling and Fred Dervin, draws on the analysis of data
collected within group discussions with master’s students who took an
academic writing course at the University of Helsinki (Finland). It
contributes to the research by demonstrating that even though
translanguaging is regarded by some students positively as a strategy
to promote learning and shift knowledge-building, it is not included
as institutional practice. The authors point to the necessity of
introducing translanguaging through educational platforms.
Chapter 5, “Fostering Students’ Decentring and Multiperspectivity: A
Cross-Discussion on Translanguaging as a Plurilingual tool in Higher
Education”, by Petra Daryai-Hansen, Danièle Moore, Daniel Roy Pearce,
and Mayo Oyama, focuses on undergraduate students’ reflections about
“languages, expectations regarding language use in teaching, and
beliefs about the role of multiple languages in co-constructing
knowledge” (p. 104) in two educational contexts in Denmark and Japan.
The authors argue that while in the Danish educational system there is
a tendency to expand students’ linguistic repertoire, decentring from
a monolingual perspective, the Japanese educational system gravitates
more to the monolingual paradigm, putting English at the centre.
Nevertheless, translanguaging is regarded positively by the
participants from both contexts to access, construct, and negotiate
knowledge.
In Chapter 6, “Teaching the conflicts in American Foreign Language
Education”, Rutie Adler, Annamaria Bellezza, Claire Kramsch, Chika
Shibahara and Lihua Zhang outline theoretical implications of
translanguaging on the example of four foreign language classrooms
(Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, and Italian). The chapter demonstrates
positive outcomes of the use of translanguaging in language courses at
different levels when discussing cultural conflicts. The students who
participated in the study expressed different views on implementing
such a topic, from postponing it to more advanced levels due to
insufficient competence in a language to wishing to include it.
Nevertheless, the authors argue that teaching conflicts is necessary
for promoting critical foreign language education and translanguaging
facilitates that by shifting the centres of knowledge acquisition.
Chapter 7, “On Matrouzity: Translanguaging and Decentring Plurilingual
Practices in Morocco”. by Heidi Bojsen, Joshua Sabih, and Khalid
Zerki, aims “to investigate how conceptual and theoretical
contributions from Moroccan authors may help to analyse and elucidate
translanguaging and decentring practices in Moroccan universities” (p.
149). The authors introduce the concept of matrouzity, which “refer[s]
to a practice of constant alternation between two languages” (p. 150)
showing that translanguaging is not a new concept. The data come from:
(1) the examples from literary works exemplifying the phenomenon of
matrouzity; (2) interviews with teachers from Moroccan universities
providing insights about the use of translanguaging in higher
education contexts, which are compared and contrasted to the Language
Profiles at Roskilde University.
Chapter 8, “Foreign Language ‘in the Wild’ and Epistemological
Decentring”, by Louise Tranekjær, represents a comparative study
demonstrating that learning foreign languages can be a tool for
epistemological decentring. The data collected in Costa Rica in
non-higher education contexts through interviews with immigrants “are
then discussed in relation to the reflections of Language Profile
students as formulated in their essays” (p. 178). Findings in these
two contexts suggest that aspiration to learn languages can have
different roots and “invite reflections about the extent to which the
formal language learning settings such as the Language Profile address
and accommodate the practice-related motivations and investments of
learners and not least the issue of how activities within the
formalized classroom can be orchestrated and arranged to bridge this
potential gap” (p. 191).
In Chapter 9, “Strategies of Decentring in Translingual Research:
Reflections on a Research Project”, Karen Risager focuses on the
research project “Representations of the World in Language Textbooks”
(Risager, 2018). In it she analyzes how the world is represented in
textbooks for six languages for different age groups of students, from
adolescents to adults, and how this project deals with strategies of
decentring. The chapter also reports the author’s reflection on
readings of “three academic texts about language textbooks used in
different parts of the world: (1) the teaching of French at a
university in Brazil; (2) the teaching of German in Estonia schools;
and (3) the teaching of English in Pakistani schools for working-class
students” (p. 198).
Chapter 10, “Student Testimonies: Translanguaging and Epistemological
Decentring from a Student Perspective”, represents a collection of
seven student essays introduced by Heidi Bojsen, Petra Daryai-Hansen,
Anne Holmen, and Karen Risager. The essays included in this chapter
are cited and analysed in different chapters of the volume. They are
divided into three sections. The first one includes two essays
reflecting on students’ motivations for learning foreign languages and
their perceptions about their personal experiences learning languages
at school and within the Language Profile programme and differences
between epistemology of such contexts. The second section consists of
three essays united by the theme of staying in exchange programmes. In
these essays, the students reflect on their stays in France and
Canada, specifically contemplating epistemological differences between
home university and exchange programme universities and the lessons
they learned from those experiences. The third section introduces two
essays about the benefits of staying abroad. Generally, the essays
from this chapter deal with the students’ views on acquiring knowledge
and cultural confrontations.
The appendix to the volume consists of a set of abstracts of Chapters
2-9.
EVALUATION
The idea to explore the connections between translanguaging and
epistemological decentring addressed in this volume, while not
entirely original, is interesting especially when taking into account
that the majority of chapters focus on higher educational settings
which are less examined in literature on translanguaging. Most of the
studies included in the volume highlight the application of
translanguaging in different countries of the world, which is also an
advantage of the volume. The diversity of linguistic contexts taken
into consideration in the volume is an excellent contribution to the
field. It touches on languages that are still understudied in the
literature, such as Japanese, Hebrew, Moroccan, Finnish, and Italian,
and this provides an opportunity to look at the same practice from a
different angle. Most chapters are easily accessible and readable by
both scholars and non-scholarly readers.
Researchers, language policy makers, and language teachers interested
in practical applications of translanguaging in university courses
will find most useful in this respect Chapters 2 to 6. The experience
of implementation of the Language Profiles programme at Roskilde
University (Chapter 2 and Chapter 5), a pilot project launched at the
University of Copenhagen (Chapter 3), a project exploring language
policy at the University of Helsinki (Chapter 4), and instructional
approaches to introduce students to cultural conflicts at UC Berkeley
(Chapter 6) can serve as a guide and source of lessons to be learned
from these experiences, both positive and negative. Translanguaging is
seen in these chapters as a useful tool for shifting from a
monolingual paradigm which promotes plurilingual competence and
sensitivity to other languages and cultures. Students’ and teachers’
reflections analysed in these chapters provide insight into their
needs and fears, which can be taken into account by teachers
implementing translanguaging at their language classes.
In this respect, it is also worth mentioning the final part of the
volume, Chapter 10, representing a set of student essays. Although
these essays have been analyzed and compared with other contexts in
most chapters of this volume, reading them in isolation is of interest
to those who develop or are involved in the development of school and
university language programs, as well as student exchange programmes,
since the essays raise pressing issues about how the epistemological
approach and language policy affect the students’ motivation for
learning, their perception of learning and teaching processes at
schools, universities and study-abroad programmes, and the ways of
mastering knowledge and developing attitudes towards languages and
cultures.
>From a methodological point of view, Chapter 9 is interesting in that
it takes a different stance at the process of the analysis. In
contrast to many other chapters in the volume which provide an
analysis of the views of students primarily and other interviewees
like migrants or teachers, Chapter 9 stands apart, bringing a new
breath and decentring from the usual type of research. In the center
of attention, there is the author, her thoughts and translingual
perception of academic texts about teaching languages in Brazil,
Estonia, and Pakistan. The author puts herself and her linguistic
baggage in relation to the texts under study, comparing epistemology
from a translingual point of view.
Concerning the coherence of the volume, I would argue that it could
have been improved by focusing more on ties between the two concepts
specified in its title. As the editors acknowledge themselves,
“drawing on or using other languages is in itself not a guarantee for
an epistemological decentring” (p. 7) referring to the results
presented in Chapters 2, 4, and 8. Thus, a deeper insight into the
nature of the relationships between translanguaging and
epistemological decentring would have been beneficial both at the
theoretical level, based on previous research, as well as at a
practical level, drawing from the data discussed in the chapters. A
few chapters address these connections, but the rest of the volume
lacks engagement with existing studies and ignores the fact that
translanguaging as an activity in itself shifts epistemological
centres in education even though it has never been explicitly labeled
“epistemological decentring” in studies on translanguaging. At the
very least, in their discussions and conclusions, the authors of the
volume could have given more explications and even added them (since
in some chapters there are none) on whether their findings support or
refute the previous research as well as identify prospective
directions for future research. Additionally, in terms of coherent
writing it would have been better practice not to add sources of
information that were not previously cited in the chapter, as is done
in some chapters (e.g. Chapters 5 and 8) in the discussion and
conclusion sections. Even though they might appear to support the
findings, such a strategy does not increase readability since the
reader was not made aware of these studies in the relevant sections
and might be confused.
Terminology is used in an inconsistent way in the volume. The editors
themselves in Chapter 1 point out that various authors use different
terms in relation to translanguaging but they “[...] have chosen not
to erase this diversity in the name of harmonization, allowing readers
to encounter and assess the diversity of definitions and analytical
deployment” (p. 3). This would make sense if the terms at least had
been defined by the authors individually, and the differences between
them explained. As it stands, it is not clear whether not erasing
diversity in terminology has any beneficial effects for the reader, or
whether an effort on the part of the editors to strive for
terminological consistency across the volume would have improved its
coherence and contributed to more terminological clarity in the field.
Take as examples Chapters 3, 5, and 9, which all deploy the term
“translingual”. In Chapters 5 and 9 the authors do not give any
explanation of what stands behind this term. Even though in Chapter 3
the authors try to explain why they prefer the term “translingual
practice” to “translanguaging”, their explanation seems rather weak.
By saying just that “translingual practices […] point to the wide
palette of linguistic resources that students and lecturers orient to
in relation to study programs” (p. 51) it does not become clear what
the difference is between the term translingual practice and the term
translanguaging. The authors refer to Canagarajah’s works without
naming them and justify the use of the term “translingual practices”
since “it resonates better with [their] participants’ needs for
enhancing learning through multilingual competences” (p. 51). However,
in other chapters of the volume (e.g. Chapters 2, 4, 7, and 8) the
authors refer to Canagarajah’s studies and use the term
“translanguaging”. Actually, Canagarajah himself (see e.g. Canagarajah
2011a, b), in analyzing the written discourse of the same student,
calls the practice applied by the student variously either
“codemeshing” or “translanguaging”. In this case, a logical question
is why not replace the term “translanguaging” with “codemeshing”
(Canagarajah 2011a), “polylingual languaging” (Jørgensen 2008) or any
other terms used in the literature, which are “different from each
other yet in many ways similar, [and] represent a view of language as
a social resource without clear boundaries in which the speaker is at
the heart of the interaction” (Blackledge and Creese 2016: 274). The
authors of Chapter 3 also refer to publications by Creese and
Blackledge (2015) and García and Li Wei (2014), justifying their
choice of the term “translingual practices” by stating that
“translanguaging seems to focus on bilingual pedagogies” (p. 51),
which is not always the case (see e.g. Cenoz and Santos 2020; Duarte
2020; Kirsch 2017). Lack of clarity in concepts makes it difficult to
understand what the authors mean specifically under “translingual
practices”. In this regard, Chapter 6 should orient the reader more in
terms of terminological difference between “translanguaging” and
“translingual practice”, pointing to the fact that “translanguaging is
not simply the translation from one linguistic code into another, nor
is it the translingual practice of switching/mixing codes in
communication with bilinguals” (p. 138).
Also on terminological issues, it is worth mentioning one more unclear
point. In Chapter 2, the author tries to connect the concept of
translanguaging with Bakhtin’s theory (1975) on heteroglossia and uses
such concepts as centrifugal and centripetal forces without
explication of what those terms actually mean. In addition, when
discussing the main findings, the author does not provide any examples
from interviews and informal conversations. This would have simplified
the comprehension of what stands behind these “forces”. Readers are
left having to guess for themselves what exactly is meant.
Concerning methodology, Chapter 7 lacks explanations of how examples
from Moroccan literature and the context of universities have been
chosen to be analysed. Literary examples are interesting without doubt
and can reflect and support the point; however, they represent a
different type of data. Moreover, interviews with university teachers
in Morocco could have been illustrated better by providing some
examples. It is not clear also how these data can be tied up with
essays of the students representing a different position from a
different context. Adding context from the Danish universities does
not seem appropriate here. One gets the impression, which could
certainly be erroneous, that the chapter has been put together from
different partial studies. Focusing only on one context with more
examples would seem more reasonable. Moreover, the authors of the
chapter refer to student essays from Chapter 10 without drawing on
concrete examples supporting their arguments, which forces readers to
look up the essays to find the examples on their own.
The same problem occurs in Chapter 8, which is also compiled from two
different contexts. I am not sure whether it is reasonable to compare
the experiences of two different groups of participants, migrants who
moved to Costa Rica from different parts of the world and had to
acquire Spanish there and students from the Language Profile programme
at Roskilde University in Denmark who reflected in their essays about
their experiences of learning languages in (non)higher educational
settings. Although each case individually is of interest to the theory
of language learning, the comparison of these two completely different
contexts does not seem to make much sense.
All in all, the volume is constructed on a certain postmodern
“anything goes” approach, perhaps in line with its aim to “decentre
epistemology”, while sacrificing depth and consistency necessary for
scientific process in the discipline. The choice not to harmonise
terminology but to use various terms for essentially the same activity
or phenomenon, and leaving it to the reader to interpret the terms for
themselves, is symptomatic of this approach to epistemology.

References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1975. Слово в романе [Discourse in the Novel]. In
Mikhail Bakhtin Вопросы литературы и эстетики: исследования разных лет
[Issues of Literature and Esthetics: Studies of Different Years].
Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura.
Blackledge, Adrian & Angela Creese. 2016. A linguistic ethnography of
identity: Adopting a heteroglossic frame. In Siân Preece (ed.). The
Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, 272–288. London/New York:
Taylor & Francis Group.
Bojsen, Heidi, Petra Daryai-Hansen, Anne Holmen and Karen Risager.
(eds.). 2023. Translanguaging and epistemological decentring in higher
education and research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Canagarajah, Suresh. 2011a. Codemeshing in academic writing:
Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. The Modern
Language Journal 95 (3). 401–417.
Canagarajah, Suresh. 2011b. Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging
issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review 2. 1–28.
Cenoz, Jasone and Alaitz Santos, 2020. Implementing pedagogical
translanguaging in trilingual schools. System 92.
Creese, Angela & Adrian Blackledge. 2015. Translanguaging and identity
in educational settings. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35.
20-35.
Duarte, Joana. 2020. Translanguaging in the context of mainstream
multilingual education. International Journal of Multilingualism
17(2). 232–247.
García, Ofelia and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language,
Bilingualism and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jørgensen, J. Normann. 2008. Polylingual languaging around and among
children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5.
161–176.
Kirsch, Claudine. 2017. Young children capitalising on their entire
language repertoire for language learning at school. Language Culture
and Curriculum 31(1). 39–55.
Risager, Karen. 2018. Representations of the World in Language
Textbooks. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Williams, Cen. 1994. Arfarniad o ddulliau dysgu ac addysgu yng
nghyd-destun addysg uwchradd ddwyieithog [An Evaluation of Teaching
and Learning Methods in the Context of Bilingual Secondary Education].
Bangor: University of Wales.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Evgeniia Iurinok holds a master degree in Theoretical and Applied
linguistics from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). She is
currently doing a PhD in Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu
Fabra University. Her project aims to investigate potential
translanguaging phenomena in the context of Russian as an additional
language. Her scientific interests are translanguaging, additional
language teaching and learning, language acquisition, sociolinguistics
and philosophy of language.



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