Toward Inclusive Translanguaging in Multilingual Classrooms

As the world moves to a post-COVID stage and movement of goods and people across borders resumes, we need to rethink how we communicate and educate students about communication in a superdiverse world with increased presence of minoritized languages and varieties. The growing evidence of translanguaging practices among plurilingual speakers in multilingual societies and linguistic minority communities across the globe (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2017; Oliver et al., 2020; Seals & Olsen-Reeder, 2020; Straszer et al., 2022) has prompted greater attention to equity and linguistic social justice issues in language education. Pedagogical translanguaging has been put forward as an “all encompassing” (Li, 2018, p. 9) practice to address linguistic inequities and injustices in the classroom. While it is a step forward in countering monolingual ideology and the dominant-language-exclusive policy and sanction, I draw attention to the “selective” nature of much of the current pedagogical translanguaging approach and argue for “inclusive translanguaging” that capitalizes on all of the languages, cultures, and identities of plurilingual speakers who have historically received marginalization, including their non-dominant dialects or mother tongues.