TRANSLANGUAGING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CLASSROOM SPACE: On the Affordances of Disrupting Linguistic Boundaries

This chapter explores how emergent bilingual children and youth engage in everyday forms of translanguaging within the context of classroom interactions. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data from three urban schools, it highlights the ways in which these students transform the social space of their respective classrooms by disrupting supposed linguistic boundaries and generating novel opportunities for learning and social interaction. These findings point to the need to follow the lead of emergent bilingual students in the development and implementation of translingual policies and pedagogies. The ways students normalize translanguaging in their everyday expressions of bilingualism can be leveraged in classrooms to prepare them to engage with multiple communities.