‘It takes a village to research a village’: Conversations between Angel Lin and Jay Lemke on contemporary issues in translanguaging

While translanguaging perspectives have been gaining currency worldwide (e.g. García and Li, Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York/London, 2014; García and Lin, Translanguaging in bilingual education. In: García O, Lin, AMY, May S (eds) Bilingual and multilingual education. Springer, Cham, pp 117–130, 2017; Nikula and Moore, Int J Biling Edu Biling 22(2):237–249, 2019), some issues remain contested, e.g. its differences from code-switching/code-mixing and the tensions between the proposal of one holistic repertoire and the existence of different languages felt by language users. To shed light on these issues, this chapter presents ongoing interview discussions between two internationally renowned experts Dr. Angel Lin and Dr. Jay Lemke proposing the perspective translanguaging and flows (Lemke, 2016) as another theoretical basis for deepening the theorization of translanguaging, which integrates and extends key extant theoretical strands of translanguaging, i.e., García and Li (Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York/London, 2014), Li (Appl Linguist 39(1):9–30, 2018), Thibault’s (Ecological Psychology, 23(3):210–245, 2011) conceptions of first-order languaging and second-order language. The central tenet of this chapter is to move beyond an over-emphasis on static, structuralist, named and bounded language systems (a substance-based ontology) to an emphasis on dynamic processes happening in and through mediums interconnecting across multiple timescales (a process-based ontology) to better elucidate sense- and meaning-making practices in the real world. Copyright © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.