Heading South, Unmuting Multilingualisms: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

The central thesis of Uccelli's target article is a dire need to identify the causes of inequalities in literacy and language education from the fourth grade, and which pedagogies best eliminate them. Uccelli's quest for empirical, pedagogical, and theoretical insights to counter injustice, and to give voice to rather than silence students, is urgent and welcome. Effective redress of structural inequalities associated with language and literacy in formal education, however, cannot occur through a universalist worldview embedded in a northern episteme and in one language, English. It is time to turn to and learn from societies that hold pluriversal worldviews, predominantly beyond the Euro-North. My concern in this commentary is mostly with students who live in highly multilingual low-income countries of the South. It is also with those who migrate to high-income, less multilingual societies where challenges of diversity increase rather than resolve.

I argue that linguists and teachers need to understand the relationships among cognition and development of bilingual/multilingual capability and literacy; plural ways of knowing, believing, and being; and knowledge exchange and production. These relationships are invisibilized in a universalist northern-facing curriculum, pedagogy and assessment regime, and texts published only in English. English cannot reflect the epistemological, ontological, or cosmological nuances and pluralities expressed in the 7,000 or more language communities of the world, nor do its texts include extensive knowledge produced beyond English. Yet, there is much to be learned from the expertise in secular and faith-based bilingual and multilingual education and in languages and scripts that are neither English nor Latin. Scholars currently enjoying privileged access to academic publishing opportunities (in English), to elevated citation counts, and to generous research grants cannot afford to ignore studies in multilingualisms from Africa and South Asia much longer.

Yes, there is space for the horizontal practices of translanguaging that northern-facing scholarship seems to have discovered only recently in the to-ing and fro-ing between languages, especially in spoken discourse, familiar to all bilingual and multilingual peoples, and included in more familiarly known codemixing, codeswitching. However, some 2,000 years of formalized clerical and scholarly teaching in Africa and India show that pedagogical value in written translation between clearly identified languages is marked. This has also been evident in the last 120 years of research on bilingual/multilingual education in formal, informal, and nonformal schooling in these settings (Alidou et al., 2006; Heugh, 2023; Mohanty, 2018). To achieve equality of access to further education and career opportunities, students need vertical expertise in written translation in both their most well-known and used language and one used for purposes of wider (national or international) communication (Heugh, 2021).

Moreover, if we are serious about equality, we need to attend to the voices and agency of students, parents, and communities globally. Most of those who experience systemic marginalization are acutely aware of how the structural artifice and technologies of linguistic exclusion work. They already have the horizontal translanguaging expertise now ironically being acquired by northern-facing academics. What they desire and require is access to the same high-level academic language expertise that linguists enjoy. They know that this is the instrumental key that opens doors of exclusion. It means high-level capability in language differentiation for purposes of precision (e.g., for scientific, legal, safety, security, international spoken or signed, and written purposes). This can be achieved through purposeful, systematic use of translation (central to vertical translanguaging), together with pedagogies of voices. However, these need to be embedded in bilingual/multilingual education for most students globally (Heugh, 2011, 2021). Monolingual students in the Anglosphere risk being left behind as the center shifts from the Euro-North toward Asia and the South. So, the sooner educators return all students to additional language and bilingual/multilingual programs with strong academic and professional outcomes, the more swiftly parochial concerns of inequalities can be redirected to secure students’ futures in a rapidly changing world.

Uccelli is right, the field needs pedagogies of voices, not those of silence. Educators do need to address the gaps in literacy that silence many students, particularly those obliged to learn through a second or third language or dialect. The gaps, however, are more acute for students in postcolonial low-income countries. This means moving beyond the silencing of bilingual/multilingual expertise in and beyond the Euro-North (Ouane & Glanz, 2010; Mohanty, 2018; Heugh, 2023).

Unashamedly, the priority is bilingual and multilingual education that includes both (a) horizontal, convivial, and spoken use of multilingual practices that bridge and mediate information flows across languages and (b) systematic use of vertical practices of written translation and spoken or signed interpreting to achieve high levels of academic language proficiency (whether one calls this analytical or scientific language) for all students to achieve equality of access and outcomes. Anything less simply continues cycles of inequality.