Building Plurilingual TESOL Pedagogies from the Ground Up: Integrating Old and New Perspectives

Abstract

Code-mixing/code-switching in the classroom has been an important research topic in critical sociolinguistic and ethnographic research in the past two decades (Canagarajah, 1995; Lin, 1999; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001, Lin, 2008). Recent research developments have further introduced the perspectives of translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge, 2010), codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011), and multimodality (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Lin, 2012). Central to all these research developments is the recognition of the plurilinguistic nature of classroom interactions and communicative repertoires of both learners and teachers in multilingual settings, and the affirmation of plurilingualism as a resource rather than a barrier to language and content teaching and learning. Plurilinguals may possess a very limited mastery of a language, but still view it as an enriching component of their overall linguistic repertoire. This is especially relevant in postcolonial contexts where many students strive to acquire English for its socioeconomic value while maintaining their L1 cultural and linguistic identities (Lin, 2000). However, this understanding is not readily shared by many mainstream discourses in education language policy, and TESOL pedagogies are still very much dominated by monolingual native-speakerism, especially in East Asian contexts (Luk & Lin, 2006). Education language policy makers still tend to hold disparaging views towards, and legislate against, plurilingual classroom practices and pedagogies (Lin, 1996, 2006). Given this situation, how do we build plurilingual TESOL pedagogies from the ground up despite the domination of monolingual language education policies? In this paper I shall integrate both old and new research perspectives and methodologies from critical sociolinguistics, critical ethnography, and critical TESOL pedagogies (Shin, 2005; Mambu, 2010), while situating all of these in the contemporary sociopolitical contexts of language-in-education policy research studies, especially those in Hong Kong (Tsui & Tollefson, 2007; Lin & Man, 2009).