Relanguaging: sorting things out and bringing things together in Khayelitshan English classrooms

• Autores: Lara Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 45, Nº. 3, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Fixity and fluidity in language and language education), págs. 680-695
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The practices of sorting things out and bringing things together, which I summarise under the term relanguaging, sit between fluid, situated languaging practices and the administrative standard grid in education that relies on bounded, named languages. Relanguaging, I argue, was invisible to socio- and applied linguists’ analytical vision because of a tendency to set named languages as the norm. This led to questions about switching between or transcending languages but not about producing and dissolving them. Together with two English teachers in Khayelitsha, South Africa, I instead set fluid languaging practices as the analytical norm to then investigate the relationship between such fluidity and (administratively) fixed languages. The language classrooms I focus on then emerge as one of the production sites of named languages – here of English. English teachers (sometimes in collaboration with their students) sort out extremely complex spatial repertoires with various heterogeneous linguistic resources to produce English as a recognisable, teachable and learnable entity. The reflections I present suggest a different idea of how language classrooms work (also in settings beyond Khayelitsha) but they also open up (language) philosophical questions about the ontology of linguistic features and how they come to be English (or not).