Translanguaging in culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics

In today’s globalized multilingual classrooms, deficit ideologies tend to disregard the cultural capital and mobile semiotic resources that immigrant and culturally diverse students bring with them (Blommaert 2010). There is a growing need to focus on culturally sustaining pedagogies that reframe how we think about teaching multilingual learners (Paris and Alim 2017). By bringing two perspectives – Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday 1993) theory and García’s (2009) notion of translanguaging – into dialogue, we explore their conceptual alignments and complementarities. Building upon this, we envision culturally sustaining SFL as an integrative framework which holds the promise of fostering meaningful heteroglossic contexts of learning for multilingual learners in supporting their multiliteracies (see Khote 2017; Harman and Khote 2018). Data from one of the author’s English Language Arts (ELA) classroom will further illustrate: (a) how students’ complex linguistic repertoires were mobilized as a foundational resource for developing disciplinary literacy, and (b) how multilingual students engaged with the curriculum to interrogate discourses that diminish their authentic participation in the classroom.