Engaging with the symposium theme, this conceptual paper addresses why critical sociolinguistic inquiry is important to carry out in second language classes and how it may support teachers in implementing critical pedagogies. Broadly, our argument asserts a renewed vision of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) through a translanguaging (TL) stance, emphasizing critical sociolinguistic inquiry and embodied practice.
Drawing on experience in language and teacher education across K–12 and postsecondary contexts both in Canada and other countries, we have come to understand that while textbooks and ready-made resources are useful references, teaching and learning comes alive when it connects with who students are and what concerns and interests them, which generates possibilities for sociolinguistic inquiry and anchors language learning and use in addressing social issues. However, current dominant approaches to TESOL continue to follow the ideology of pragmatism (Benesch, 1993), frequently dominated by skills-based curricula (i.e., reading, writing, listening, speaking) and structured, prescriptive, and generalized teaching strategies, methods and approaches. Unless grounded in problem-posing inquiry, this pragmatic approach can reinforce and uphold the status quo, rather than allowing students to recognize, explore, and question how such topics can affect personal, political, economic, and cultural lives.
Language and literacy (particularly print-based) have been privileged representational practices, raising the question of what is missing in understanding meaning and meaning making from a merely humanist perspective. Taking up the call from García et al. (2021) to decolonize and challenge the abyssal line – that is, arbitrary division that renders invisible and irrelevant the experiences and knowledges of minoritized communities (de Sousa Santos, 2018) - we draw on TL to assert an activist agenda to dismantle mono/lingualism, inviting a more dynamic and expansive view of multilingualism that recognizes networks of meaning distributed across linguistic and nonlinguistic forms. This openness to all resources beyond language commensurates with the emerging posthumanist and new materialist perspectives in applied linguistics to consider how bodies, objects, and space intersect as wider assemblages, inciting critical citizenship in ethical interdependence between the human and natural world.
Emergent from this understanding, we propose a systematic, coherent TL methodology for TESOL, engaging teachers and students in critical sociolinguistic inquiry and embodied practice to support interrogation of language and power, mapping intra-actions in the human, social and eco-environment. Engaging a broader and more encompassing trans-systemic TL theorization, we present a heuristic model with which to articulate teaching and learning practices that fully reflect, mobilize and strengthen assemblages of meaning making and repertoires of practice across the human and natural world. With this approach teachers might explore with students ways of doing/being/knowing in reflexivity towards different forms of inequity, particularly one's privilege and complicity and ethical responsibility within the sociocultural, sociopolitical, and eco-world. Illustrated with examples from classroom practice, the presentation will make visible how this model can be applied to explore how language functions and intersects with power, drawing attention to cultural, eco-social and political circumstances that mediate language teaching and use.
