TESOL Journal - 2014 - Jain - Global Englishes Translinguistic Identities and Translingual Practices in A Community
TESOL Journal - 2014 - Jain - Global Englishes Translinguistic Identities and Translingual Practices in A Community
TESOL Journal - 2014 - Jain - Global Englishes Translinguistic Identities and Translingual Practices in A Community
Global Englishes,
Translinguistic Identities, and
Translingual Practices in a
Community College ESL
Classroom: A Practitioner
Researcher Reports
RASHI JAIN
University of Maryland College Park
1
I usually introduce myself as an Indian at the beginning of the semester, and often refer to my
Indian background when teaching.
I drew another line from () on the board, and wrote the word
parentheses at the end of it. I said, “When I first came here, I had no
idea what this word parentheses meant. I guessed it. I guessed it on
my own by reading the text. I was like what . . . where . . . I don’t
see anything else that looks like a parenthesis so it must be this,”
pointing to the board (Figure 2).
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In this episode, I emphasized my own learning curve when
I transitioned from the English language context in India to the
English language context in the United States. I often do so to
demonstrate to my students that I empathize with their struggles
with learning a new English as an adult, and to suggest that, like
me, they can achieve the required levels of academic English
proficiency to function successfully in U.S. academic and
professional settings.
As I explained what the word parentheses meant, I used the
synonym equivalent that was used in the Indian context—brackets.
Although I did not go into the details (e.g., brackets in the United
States usually refers to [ ] or square brackets) to stay on task,
I wanted to make sure my students from other postcolonial
English contexts would know that the brackets they were familiar
with were called parentheses in the United States.
2
Unlike India (my home country) or Cameroon (Student 1’s home country), Ethiopia does not have
a colonial history and does not share the long Anglophone background of some of the neighboring
African nations (Schmied, 2006). Yet, over the past many decades English has become the most
widely spoken foreign language, replacing French as the most common medium of instruction in
secondary schools as far back as the 1940s (Yigezu, 2010).
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
I have now described each of the four snippets individually
along with some discussion following each description. In this
section, I discuss them en masse in the context of the linguistic
and national diversity in my classroom operating within largely
monolingually oriented institutional realities. In doing so, I make
connections across the four incidents, and share the critical
insights that emerged as I analyzed and interpreted the data,
and connect these reflections with current and emerging
literature in the field. By sharing the four classroom snippets, I
hope to demonstrate how, in a language classroom populated by
English users from around the world, learning to negotiate the
target U.S. English norms, even fleeting conversations can bring
the members’ (budding) translinguistic identities to the fore.
Whether initiated by me or by my students, these conversations
made visible the diversity in the classroom and became
opportunities for mutual learning.
The four classroom snippets illustrate specifically the diversity
across global Englishes in terms of both semiodiversity and
glossodiversity. Semiodiversity or semodiversity (Halliday, 2002,
2007) refers to the diversity of meanings that exist in a language,
as compared to glossodiversity which refers to diversity of
languages as well as diversity of form between language varieties.
Dominant models of global Englishes have thus far focused more
on diversity in terms of form and language varieties, or
glossodiversity (see Canagarajah, 2013a; Pennycook, 2008a).
However, as Canagarajah (2013a) reminds us,
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We should not consider the diversity and appropriation of Eng-
lish in instances of form changes only. The same word or gram-
matical item can be made to index new values and meanings as
it travels through diverse spatio-temporal contexts. (p. 57)
3
. . .or two different things in the same English language context, such as in the United States. How-
ever, I did not discuss this aspect at the time, given the constraints.
CONCLUSION
Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009a) define local knowledge as “both a
way of knowing about teaching and what teachers and
communities come to know when they build knowledge
collaboratively” (p. 45). Explaining further, the authors state that
local knowledge can be
. . . understood as a process of building and critiquing concep-
tual frameworks that link action and problem-posing to an
immediate teaching context as well as to larger and more public
social, cultural, and political issues. (p. 45)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the anonymous reviewer(s) for the valuable comments on
an earlier version of this article, and Dr. Sarah Henderson and Dr.
Gloria Park for their editorial support. I also express my gratitude
to my community college students—without their insightful and
thought-provoking classroom commentary, my practitioner
research inquiries would not be possible.
THE AUTHOR
Rashi Jain received her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, with
a special focus on Second Language Education and Culture, at the
University of Maryland College Park. Rashi is currently a lecturer
and administrator in the College of Education at the University of
518 TESOL Journal
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Maryland College Park, and an adjunct professor at Montgomery
College in Maryland. Her research interests span practitioner
research and inquiry, translingualism and translinguistic identities,
international education, world/translingual Englishes, and TESOL
practices.
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