Liberating Language Education

Dominant paradigms of language and language education worldwide continue to be based on static notions of language as code, as a rule-governed system that is coterminous with stable communities and identities and on prescriptive pedagogical and language assessment models. This book sets out to challenge such an ordered categorisation of languages, cultures and identities. It seeks to stretch and explode their meanings by focusing on the relationships and entanglements that these complex concepts establish with specific contexts. It sits within a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that has placed an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and has illuminated how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. This line of research has alerted us to the importance of harnessing the pedagogic potential that comes with valorising and strategically deploying the multilingual repertoires of learners and teachers across a range of contexts of instruction and learning. Yet, there is a need for further empirical work that engages with new ways of understanding language and language education. These new ways expand the meaning of language by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The current volume extends this scholarship, by illustrating how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities