A Pedagogical Perspective of Translanguaging in the ASEAN Context: A Lesson from Blogging

Abstract

The focus of this study is to highlight how multilingual society such as in the Philippines and Singapore use translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), an umbrella term which is more than hybrid languages (Gutierrez et al., 1999) and code-switching and code-mixing (Bautista 2004; Mahootian, 2006) in journalistic blogs provided by yahoo.sg and yahoo.ph. Translanguaging is a linguistic resource used by various respondents to express their thoughts and feelings. The data in this study suggests that the majority of the participants exhibit a high degree of social intolerance mainly because their blogs are uncensored. The interaction among the participants through translanguaging was maintained using linguistic resources such as their varying language abilities and other semiotic devices found in journalistic blogging. This present paper focuses on one area that was of topical interest in Singapore and The Philippines: education. The implications of this study may well be that diverse ethnic backgrounds, allied to diversity in societies illustrate that people’s linguistic repertoires, “reflect the polycentricity of their environments” and is important to education specifically in language learning (Blommaert & Backus, 2013, p.20).