DIALOGUES ON TRANSLINGUAL RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: WEAVING THREADS WITH SURESH CANAGARAJAH’S VIEWS

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to engage with the ideas of Suresh Canagarajah – a highly acknowledged scholar from Penn State University, in the United States of America – on translingual research and practice. In order to do so, an interview with him was jointly planned by Ruberval Franco Maciel (UEMS) and Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha (UNICAMP) and carried out in August 2019, during an event held in Brazil. Taking into account the increasing number of studies on translingualism worldwide in the past few years and the leading role played by Canagarajah’s work in this field, the interview aimed at expanding views and contributing to broaden the scholarship in this area. To situate and contextualize the author’s ideas, some considerations on translanguaging as a language theory and educational approach are firstly made. As a result, Canagarajah’s voice and points of view are put in dialogue with a plurality of ideas, highlighting the complex, dynamic and challenging nature of a translingual turn in contemporary times and its possible connections with Brazilian language studies. Translingual work intertwined with affective, multimodal and multisensory approaches is considered a possible and interesting path to be explored in the near future.

Keywords

• translingual research and practice
• translanguaging education
• affect
• multimodal lens
• multisensory approach.