Translanguaging ideology? Scholars’ and practitioners’ discourses in a foreign-language education context

Abstract In reframing foreign-language education into translanguaging pedagogy, educators’ criticality of monoglossic ideologies is important. This article analyzes the discourses of scholars and practitioners raising objections against Japan’s neoliberal language-in-education policy of teaching English through English to examine whether their voices are underlain by the ideology of translanguaging. The data consisted of two sets: collections of teachers’ reports of their practices published by Shin-Eiken (or the New English Teachers’ Association), a grass-roots teachers’ association founded in 1959, and critiques written by a group of four scholars supporting Shin-Eiken . The practitioners’ data set comprised 61 reports of their handed-down pedagogical practice called self-expression published in 2013–2023 and 22 reports written by their predecessors in 1974–1979. The scholars’ data came from their eight books published in 2011–2020. We performed theoretical thematic analysis to identify themes of translanguaging ideology and of monolingualism ideology. The analysis found translanguaging-minded beliefs in recent and past Shin-Eiken teachers’ discourses where they acknowledged students’ multimodal expressions as voices from idiolects. The scholars, in contrast, emphasized prescriptive use of Japanese and English as two distinct languages. We conclude that the teachers’ ideology emerged from their on-the-ground engagement with marginalized students.