Author: Alanna Frost

Translingual activism for a language always in translation such as English presents many challenges but also many possibilities for the English language teacher. -Alastair Pennycook The lure of what Pennycook calls “translingual activism,” and I will here call translanguaging-as-pedagogical-philosophy  (reserving the right to change my mind later) began, for me, with Min Zhan Lu’s call for “responsible and responsive” teachers of English and has since been fed by work in our own field and in applied linguistics/sociolinguistics fields (Horner, Lu, Matsuda, Canagarajah, Jordan, Tardy, Lorimer, Pennycook, Cenoz and Gortimer). My glossed summary of the conversation goes something like this: let’s…