This research proposes to articulate the fields of translanguaging with that of investment as a way of understanding multilingual interaction in Higher Education as a zone of contact and a potential site of tensions and conflicts. The notion of ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1991) captures how university classrooms are becoming multilingual and multicultural sites, where people with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds intersect and interact at such a point. The potential site of tension and conflicts pictures how these classrooms may become fields of struggle for classroom participants to determine conditions and criteria of their legitimacy. On this site, there might be unequal power relations, conflicting ideologies, and existing linguistic hierarchy that lead language users not to translanguage but to speak monolingually or stay silent. Therefore, this research aims to explore what drives classroom participants in a multilingual higher education classroom to either speak monolingually, translanguage, or stay silent. Specifically, this study plans to take the case of one UK higher education classroom and proposes the following research questions: 1) What are classroom participants’ multilingual practices? 2) what drives classroom participants to talk monolingually, to translanguage, or to stay silent? 3) how are participants’ language choices impacted by conflicting ideologies, cultures, and a sense of legitimacy? This report will present an exploratory review of translanguaging and investment as a way of highlighting the paucity of studies that investigate both concepts jointly and argue for the potential of adopting the lens of investment (e.g., Norton 1995) to explore multilingual higher educational context.

Authors:
Yongqi Zeng, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Jingyao Shi, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Yongqi Zeng (Vivienne) is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

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