Abstract Summary
The concept of ‘relanguaging’, introduced in this study based on language practices in South African English classrooms, systematically unsettles the dichotomy between linguistic fluidity and fixity. Based on the conceptual integration of these two dimensions of language, I propose alternative ways of assessing Standard English beyond monolingual tests.
Abstract :
It is new common-sense under the paradigm of translingualism in socio- and applied linguistics that speakers are always languaging, not using languages. Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity – most prominently captured in the notion of ‘translanguaging’ (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015) – are seen as normative and natural. In turn, homogeneity and fixity, instantiated for example in standard languages, are becoming the ‘odd-ones-out’. In this study I challenge the dichotomy between linguistic fluidity (languagING) and fixity (languageS), by looking at language practices in English classrooms in a South African township school. I conceptualise these spaces as folding the linguistic fluidity typical of South African townships (Banda, 2018; Dowling, 2011), and the fixity of Standard English as the homogenised and bounded target language, into one complex spatial repertoire (Canagarajah, 2018; de Certeau, 1985; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015). Using linguistic ethnography on data from classroom observations and teacher interviews I find that teachers order this spatial repertoire via a linguistic sorting practice I call relanguaging. With this practice they negotiate local fluid linguistic realities, and the demands of a centralised curriculum and testing system that relies on fixed standard languages. I argue that in contrast to translanguaging, which puts fluidity centre stage and tends to exclude or even denaturalise linguistic fixity, relanguaging systematically unsettles the dichotomy between languagING and languageS. It allows for the conceptual integration of these two dimensions of language, opening up new perspectives on language teaching and testing. Based on this study I propose for example ways of testing for Standard English beyond its own confines, using heterogeneous writing tasks that can make visible increasingly sophisticated linguistic sorting skills as students learn to homogenise a heterogeneous spatial repertoire – that is, as they begin to order and sort out heterogeneous linguistic resources according to the rules of a standard language.
