The subtle interactional dance of a teacher: The negotiation of pupil-teacher translanguaging practices in a Brussels’ Dutch-medium secondary school
Abstract In this article, the nuanced complexities of translanguaging practices in teacher-pupil interaction are studied. Negotiation of teacher-pupil translanguaging practices is analysed in a diverse classroom in a monolingual school context in which other languages than the language of instruction are not accepted. Throughout the selected English course, translanguaging practices including different named languages (i.e. French, Dutch, English, Arabic) unfold in teacher-pupil interaction. Whereas the teacher merely has to safeguard boundaries between languages according to modernist school structures, results also indicate that the management of pupils’ translanguaging by a teacher in a multilingual, postmodern context guided by modernist institutional rules is negotiated in interaction. This negotiation of translanguaging practices in interaction is guided by power inequalities and impacts on the teacher’s professional identity and on the valorisation of features of named languages. As a result, pupils’ and teacher’s linguistic practices can be situated on different parts of a translanguaging continuum, from more hybrid to more bounded.