Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy

335 Pages·2014·5.78 MB·English

by  Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese (auth.), Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese (eds.)

Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy
Educational Linguistics
Volume 20
Founding Editor:
Leo van Lier†
General Editor:
Francis M. Hult
Lund University, Sweden
Editorial Board:
Marilda C. Cavalcanti
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
Angela Creese
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Ingrid Gogolin
Universität Hamburg, Germany
Christine Hélot
Université de Strasbourg, France
Hilary Janks
University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Claire Kramsch
University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A
Constant Leung
King’s College London, United Kingdom
Angel Lin
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Alastair Pennycook
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
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Adrian Blackledge • Angela Creese
Editors
Heteroglossia as
Practice and Pedagogy
1 3
Editors
Adrian Blackledge Angela Creese
School of Education School of Education
University of Birmingham University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham
United Kingdom United Kingdom

ISSN 1572-0292
ISBN 978-94-007-7855-9 ISBN 978-94-007-7856-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7856-6
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013955738
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Foreword
Eva, my granddaughter, aged 5, moved from Washington DC to Mexico City last
Fall and with her growing interest in reading and her mother’s able assistance as
a scribe, we took up emailing (in addition to skyping) to keep in touch—mostly
in English, still her dominant language, though she is rapidly gaining fluency in
Spanish. At one point, in April, I wrote a note to Eva and another to her little sister
Vivica, aged 2, both in English; and after receiving Eva’s response to her own note,
was delighted to also get the following email (font colour, size, and formatting re-
moved). My daughter introduces it and comments once within (underlined):
Eva read almost the whole note that Nainee sent to Eva!:) Now Eva is writing a note to
Nainee as if she were Vivi:
Dear Nainee, Este dia vamonos a la Feria! hehehehe. Pero, yo no va a la Feria. Hmm! No
es fair. Si yo voy a la Feria cuando soy grande lo voy a gustar mucho. Y si yo voy a la Feria
otra vez voy a gustar la mucho mucho mucho. Y quiero palomitas. Pero yo si fue a una
fiesta y me pintaron como Spiderman!!! ( Vivi insisted and was the only girl that was not a
princess.) Y me gusta todo en el mundo y el mundo es bien. Abrazos!! Vivi
Dear Nainee, This day we will go to the Amusement Park! hehehehe. But, I doesn’t go to
the Amusement Park. Hmm! That’s not fair. If I go to the Amusement Park when I’m big,
I will like it a lot. And if I go to the Amusement Park again I will like it very much, much,
much. And I want popcorn. But I did go to a party and they painted me like Spiderman ( Vivi
insisted and was the only girl that was not a princess.) And I like everything in the world
and the world is well. Hugs!! Vivi
Among the features that charmed me in this message were Eva’s use of Spanish
in recognition of Vivi’s dominance in and preference for that language, her topic
and word choice that so aptly capture her little sister’s views and experience of the
world, and her whole idea of explicitly voicing her sister in the first place; hence her
email came readily to mind as I pondered Bakhtinian themes of indexicality, styliza-
tion, and multivoicedness that run through this volume. Also of note is that although
from a code-based perspective, Eva’s (or is she representing Vivi’s?) Spanish has
grammatical mistakes and the occasional English word (bolded in the translation),
she draws quite effectively on her available linguistic resources to communicate
information, emotion, and even social evaluation.
This small and personally meaningful bit of Eva’s heteroglossia gives but a hint
of the creative heteroglossic practices readers will encounter in the pages of this
v
vi Foreword
volume. You will be introduced to a wealth of multilingual texts and discourses
constructed in sometimes contested spaces in and out of schools. Among these
spaces are a multigrade primary classroom in Vienna, a bilingual teacher education
program in Alsace, a massively multilingual high school ESL classroom in Phila-
delphia, 7th–9th grade classes in a Copenhagen public school serving linguistic
minority children, a New Latino diaspora elementary school in the U.S., trilingual
education classrooms in the Basque country, a 9th–10th grade Latino newcomer
English language arts classroom in New York City, an inner London multiethnic
secondary school, and a Panjabi language classroom in Birmingham, UK; but also
a multi-ethnic working class neighbourhood in the UK; rap performances by Inari
Sámi schoolchildren in Finland, by a new and boldly eclectic hip hop group in Hong
Kong, and by a whole generation of fluidly multilingual Quebecois hip hop artists
and poets; Ghanaian taxi drivers’ decorative inscriptions on their vehicles; and desk-
top videoconferencing between American learners of French and their French tutors
in France, a website design class for adult Latino immigrants in the US borderlands,
and a mobile phone texting code used in Wesbank township in South Africa.
Introducing this rich and deeply insightful collection of essays, Blackledge and
Creese propose heteroglossia as ‘an analytic perspective that takes linguistic diver-
sity to be constitutive of, and constituted by, social diversity’ and go on to frame the
volume and its unifying analytical perspective in relation to Bakhtin’s thinking on
heteroglossia as ideologically-infused indexicality, tension-filled interaction–espe-
cially stylization and hidden dialogicality, and hierarchically-layered multivoiced-
ness. Acknowledging and building on several decades of research on multilingual-
ism and multilingual education, they foreground translanguaging as heteroglossic
practice and pedagogy, illustrating this with an example from their own classroom
research, and arguing that for scholars and educators to adopt a heteroglossic lens
is ‘to ensure that we bring into play, both in practice and in pedagogy, voices which
index students’ localities, social histories, circumstances, and identities.’ These are
claims that resonate deeply for me with key lessons I took from the continua of bi-
literacy, namely that the more we allow and enable language minoritized learners to
draw on all points of the media, context, development, and content continua of their
multilingual repertoires the greater the possibilities for activation of their voices;
and that inclusion of learners’ voice and agency is the only ethically acceptable
solution when it comes to educating a linguistically and culturally diverse learner
population which, in today’s world, means every learner in every classroom (Horn-
berger 1989; Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2000; Hornberger 2006).
Indeed, I find resonance in all the chapters that follow, along with new insights
and formulations. The authors draw deeply and authoritatively on Bakhtin’s evoca-
tive conceptual lexicon–chronotope, voice, dialogism, double-voicing, centrifugal/
centripetal forces, genre, ideological becoming, and, centrally, raznojazyčie ‘lin-
guistic diversity,’ raznogolosie ‘multidiscursivity’ and raznorečie ‘multivoiced-
ness.’ Beyond this, though, they utilize an exceptionally rich analytical repertoire
to bring their examples of heteroglossic practice and pedagogy to life, including:
enregisterment, metacommentary, repertoire, autopoiesis, integrationism, transcul-
turación, border crossing, language crossing, interaction ritual, performance, poetics
Foreword vii
of creolization, language, oraliture, rhizomatic analysis, nexus analysis, structure
of feeling, multimodality, scaffolding, and of course languaging and translanguag-
ing. The effect is an invigorating theoretical and empirical portrait of transgressive
and creative heteroglossic practices increasingly finding their way into informal and
formal learning spaces across the globe. Even more importantly, in my estimation,
the examples and analyses herein give unmistakeable evidence of the emancipatory
possibilities and transformative promise of heteroglossic practices and pedagogies
for the many language minoritized groups who have heretofore been so relentlessly
ill-served by our educational systems.
Nancy H. Hornberger
June 2013
References
Hornberger, N. H. 1989. Continua of biliteracy. Review of Educational Research 59 (3): 271–296.
Hornberger, N. H. 2006. Voice and biliteracy in indigenous language revitalization: Contentious
educational practices in Quechua, Guarani, and Maori contexts. Journal of Language, Iden-
tity, and Education 5 (4): 277–292.
Hornberger, N. H., and E. Skilton-Sylvester. 2000. Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: Interna-
tional and critical perspectives. Language and Education: An International Journal 14 (2):
96–122.
Contents
1 Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy ............................................... 1
Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese
2 Building on Heteroglossia and Heterogeneity: The
Experience of a Multilingual Classroom ............................................... 21
Brigitta Busch
3 Heteroglossia, Voicing and Social Categorisation ................................ 41
Lian Malai Madsen
4 Heteroglossia in Action: Sámi Children, Textbooks and Rap ............. 59
Sari Pietikäinen and Hannele Dufva
5 ‘The Lord Is My Shock Absorber’: A Sociohistorical
Integrationist Approach to Mid-Twentieth-Century Literacy
Practices in Ghana .................................................................................. 75
Sinfree Makoni
6 Translanguaging in the Multilingual Montreal Hip-Hop
Community: Everyday Poetics as Counter to the Myths of
the Monolingual Classroom ................................................................... 99
Bronwen Low and Mela Sarkar
7 Hip-Hop Heteroglossia as Practice, Pleasure, and Public
Pedagogy: Translanguaging in the lyrical poetics of “24
Herbs” in Hong Kong .............................................................................. 119
Angel Lin
8 Learning a Supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African
Township .................................................................................................. 137
Jan Blommaert and Fie Velghe
ix
x Contents
9 T he Ambiguous World of Heteroglossic Computer-
Mediated Language Learning .............................................................. 155
David Malinowski and Claire Kramsch
10 Heteroglossic Practices in the Online Publishing Process:
Complexities in Digital and Geographical Borderlands .................... 179
Silvia Noguerón-Liu and Doris S. Warriner
11 Theorizing and Enacting Translanguaging for Social Justice ........... 199
Ofelia García and Camila Leiva
12 Rethinking Bilingual Pedagogy in Alsace: Translingual
Writers and Translanguaging .............................................................. 217
Christine Hélot
13 Focus on Multilingualism as an Approach in
Educational Contexts ............................................................................ 239
Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter
14 ‘gusame ka’ lata!: Faux Spanish in the New Latino Diaspora .......... 255
Holly Link, Sarah Gallo and Stanton Wortham
15 Dissecting Heteroglossia: Interaction Ritual or
Performance in Crossing and Stylisation? ������������������������������������������ 275
Ben Rampton
16 Marking Communicative Repertoire Through Metacommentary ... 301
Betsy Rymes
Index ............................................................................................................... 317