The authors trace the development of the concept of translanguaging, focusing on its relation to literacies. The authors describe its connection to literacy studies, with particular attention to bi/multilingual reading and writing. Then, the authors present the development of translanguaging as a sociolinguistic theory, discuss its formulations,…

The concepts of plurilingualism and translanguaging are explained and distinguished, showing how each has contributed to transformations in the study of bilingualism and multilingualism. The terms have introduced different epistemologies related to multilingual speakers. The two concepts have different socio-political grounding, a difference that…

This coda considers how translanguaging discourse is manifested in classrooms. Li Wei and Lin open up spaces of possibility for translanguaging by questioning the order of language. In so doing, the school code assumes its appropriate place as a system of coloniality.

This paper explores how the authors to the papers in this issue understand how communication takes place when interlocutors use different named languages or use different semiotic resources to make meaning. The paper looks at the many ways in which this question is answered, since multilingual interaction takes place at different societal levels,…

In this article I reflect on Turnbull's reframing of foreign language education through a bilingual framework. I argue that in order for this important shift to be generative, foreign language education must shed the strong link between language and nation-state that has been at the core of foreign language epistemologies. That is, foreign…

Translanguaging has opened up spaces to recognize the dynamic multilingualism of students in classrooms taught in dominant languages, and problematized concepts such as 'additive bilingualism'. This article aims to further explore two issues that remain little understood. First, translanguaging is often seen as simply the acknowledgement or use of…

Based on an analysis of the video recording and transcript of one lesson chosen by preschool teachers in Luxembourg as an example of translanguaging pedagogy, this article shows the teachers' limited understandings of translanguaging. As a result of a new 2017 multilingual education policy for early childhood, the first author designed a…

Translanguaging pedagogies are considered here as mechanisms that work against the normalizing ideology of monolingual and monoglossic school language. In so doing, we consider how this restrictive view of school language and of language education policy has served to minoritize bilingual students and act as an instrument to exert…

This article considers the relevance of language policy and planning (LPP) for language education in the United States in relation to the country's longstanding and continuing multilingualism. In reflecting on the U.S. context, one striking feature is the absence of a guiding overarching explicit national educational language policy. Language…

This article traces the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last forty years. I review here the past to construct the future--the future of the past. I argue that in the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s a simple approach toward languages and bilingualism in…