Category: ARTE
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Where Our Languages Live: Translanguaging, Writing, and Language Portraits in a Teacher Education Classroom
This semester, in an undergraduate Writing Methods course in Colorado, United States, we spent several weeks building toward a central question: How do our languages shape who we are as writers, writing teachers, and humans? This was deeply connected to our semester-long focus on writing as home and writing as belonging for us as teacher-writers and for the young people in early childhood through high school that we write and teach alongside. Continue Reading Where Our Languages Live: Translanguaging, Writing, and Language Portraits in a Teacher Education Classroom -
Walking through Languages: A Saturday Morning in Footscray
Something happens when you walk through a neighbourhood listening to a language you don’t fully understand, following clues in a booklet you can only partially decode. Saturday morning in Footscray with ViệtSpeak’s Gia Đình Đi Chơi walking tour reminded me why I keep returning to questions about what language learning actually is, what it’s for, how it happens in the body and through movement rather than just in the mind through deliberate study. Continue Reading Walking through Languages: A Saturday Morning in Footscrayblogs.unimelb.edu.au/art-pl/walking-through-languages-a-saturday-morning-in-footscray
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When Languages Change Your Voice
Back in 2021, I made a video that's now had over 570,000 views on TikTok. The idea was simple: your voice actually changes when you speak different languages. If you're multilingual, you probably know what I'm talking about. When you've learnt different languages, you don't just switch words, something shifts in how you sound, how you express yourself. Continue Reading When Languages Change Your Voiceblogs.unimelb.edu.au/art-pl/when-languages-change-your-voice
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Connecting With What We Actually Have Rather Than What We’re Supposed to Have
Australian cities make translingual spaces easy to find, though we don’t always recognise them as pedagogically significant. Melbourne’s inner west operates as a multilingual contact zone where Vietnamese bakeries sit next to Greek grocers, where Somali and Macedonian blend on public transport. Sydney’s inner-city suburbs work similarly, where institutions like the Japan Foundation host events in spaces thick with linguistic diversity. This isn’t multiculturalism as policy celebration but the lived reality of urban Australia, where people routinely negotiate meaning across language boundaries. But as Canagarajah reminds us, these translingual spaces don’t simply exist by virtue of linguistic diversity. They have to be achieved through active negotiation and practice. These negotiated spaces matter for thinking about pedagogy because they show us what translingual practice actually looks like when people work to create conditions for communication across difference. Continue Reading Connecting With What We Actually Have Rather Than What We’re Supposed to Have