Translingual Practice - Suresh Canagarajah

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Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Canagarajah privileges practices and processes over products, form, and function (since the first set of terms can encompass the second).  He sees communicative participants using all their available resources, including ecological, contextual, social, and semiotic.  They use these resources to co-construct and collaborate a successful communicative event.  These practices are social, emergent, and take place in contact zones.

While acknowledging contributions of different approaches to English such as World Englishes, English as an International Language (EIL), and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), he sees translingual practices as emergent from strategies and examples he specifically mentions are accommodation, clarification, glossing, and creating shared indexicals (73).  Processes that motivate and necessitate these strategies and practices are contact, mobility, and sedimentation.

His use of "ecological" seems to map onto - or at least relate strongly - to Pennycook's idea of "local" and practice in his book Language as a Local Practice as well as Butler's ideas of performativity.  

 #translingal #semiotic #social #English #empire