A nexus analytic study of teachers’ and students’ translanguaging as a complex of ideology, practice and experience of multilingualism in the context of Swedish for immigrants (SFI)

Abstract

This presentation centers on a nexus analysis-based pilot study around teachers’ and students’ translanguaging conducted in a municipally organized adult migrant language education center called SFI. The aim of the study was to explore the suitability of nexus analysis as a theoretical framework to shed lights on the multidimensionality of translanguaging at the intersection of language in education policy, classroom language socialization practices and lived experiences. Specifically, I focused upon three different types of mutually intersecting discourses associated with multilingualism that emerged from different levels of contexts and mediated teachers’ and students’ translanguaging (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). Materials used to examine the circulating discourses around multilingualism were policy documents, observations, interviews and photos. They were analyzed through discourses in place, interaction order and historical body. Findings illuminated the complexity of multilingualism that entailed the tension of competing discourses around language in policy and practice. Furthermore, they pointed out that teachers and students strategically and symbolically drew upon the competing discourses around language, indicating how different historical bodies of individuals led to a further complexity of multilingualism. In sum, the pilot study demonstrated how nexus analysis and translanguaging may be theoretically mutually consistent in that dichotomies of micro/personal and macro/social are challenged (Li, 2011; Hult, 2016). In turn, the pilot study implicated the capacity of nexus analysis that enabled the researcher to challenge the dichotomized view of translanguaging as linguistically inclusive, socially just, transformative and therefore inherently superior to monolanguaging (Canagarajah, 2011).