García’s definition of translanguaging is more flexible than Williams’
(1994, 1996) and is defined as ‘the responsible use of hybrid language prac-
tices to educate and to enable effective communication in the classroom’
(Menken & García, 2010: 259). Under the umbrella term translanguaging,
different arrangements are observable in certain contexts, such as co-
languaging which at the secondary and tertiary level ‘is becoming a familiar
curricular language arrangement when the content has to be delivered to
different language groups simultaneously’ (García, 2009a: 302). In the pri-
mary classroom, students ‘often listen to books on tapes in the two lan-
guages, sometimes different students listening to different languages, other
times the same students going back and forth to one or the other language
in co-languaging ways’ (García, 2009a: 303).
García extends the term from the classroom to other contexts: ‘... trans-
languagings are multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order
to make sense of their bilingual worlds. Translanguaging therefore goes beyond
what has been termed code-switching... although it includes it, as well as
other kinds of bilingual language use and bilingual contact’ (2009a: 45).
García and Kleifgen (2010: 45) further explain this distinction as follows:
Translanguaging includes code-switching — the shift between two lan-
guages in context — but differs from it in significant ways, for it includes
other bilingual practices that go beyond a simple switch of code, such as
when bilingual students read in one language and then take notes, write,
or discuss in another. In addition, the term helps to make the point that
while it is true that, when seen from the outside, bilingual children tend
to do their languaging through linguistic features that are socially catego-
rized as belonging to one or another language, from the point of view of
the bilingual speaker his or her discourse can just as reasonably be viewed
as resulting from a single, coherent communicative system (Otheguy,
2009). This system is used by bilinguals to make sense of bilingual com-
munities, bilingual families, and of classrooms with multilingual stu-
dents. Translanguaging thus focuses on the complex languaging practices
of bilinguals in actual communicative settings, and not on the use of
language codes whose distinctness is monitored by the standardizing
agencies of nation-states such as language academies, grammar books,
and, of course, schools.Baker (2011: 288) elaborates on García and Kleifgen’s cognitive view of
translanguaging: ‘... translanguaging is a very typical way in which bilin-
guals engage their bilingual worlds. It is not codeswitching but more about
hybrid language use that is systematic, strategic and sense-making for
speaker and listener. Bilinguals translanguage to include and facilitate com-
munication with others, but also to construct deeper understandings and
make sense of their bilingual worlds’. It expresses the idea that there are no
Language Arrangements within Bilingual Education 145