Li Wei
MULTI-COMPETENCE,
TRANSLANGUAGING AND MOBILE
SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
 Prevalence of self-directed mobile learning
 How does the learner make sense of the
learning process: resources and strategies
 How do we as analyst make sense of the
learner making sense pf the learning process
 Two theoretical concepts/frameworks: MC
and TLAN
 Cook, V.J., 1991, The poverty-of-the-stimulus
argument and multi-competence. Second
Language Research, 7, pp. 103-117.
http://www.viviancook.uk/
Linguistic Multi-Competence
 Target: the Monolingual view of the L2
learner
 Moving towards a Bilingual view of the L2
user
 Seeing L2 learning as a process of becoming




bilingual, not another monolingual
L2 learner/learning: inherent deficit
compared to the native speaker
Seeing language learning as part of language
use/practice
L2 user/use: focusing on what they can do,
whilst recognizing the difference
An improvement on a system-centred
approach, e.g. interlanguage, towards a usercentred approach
Three premises
 MC concerns the total system for all
languages (L1, L2, Ln) in a single mind or
community and their inter-relationships
 MC does not depend on the monolingual
native speaker
 MC affects the whole mind, i.e. all language
and cognitive systems, rather than language
alone
Implications for research
design
 Looking at interactions between the
languages, not one only or one at a time
 Avoiding ‘the comparative fallacy’
 Bringing in other cognitive and semiotic
systems, not just narrowly defined ‘linguistic’
What is the purpose of
second/foreign/additional language
learning?
 Achieving bilingualism/multilingualism
 Not to replace L1
 Yet, the bilingual and multilingual language
user is rarely used as a model in
second/foreign/additional language teaching
 Norm/standard/target – monolingual ‘native’
speaker
 Leaving aside the myth of ‘the monolingual’, a
second/foreign/additional language learner, by
definition, can never be another ‘native-speaking
monolingual’ in the target language.
 Disconnection between Language Teaching
and Learning and research on Bilingualism
and Multilingualism.
 Myth: Bilinguals = ‘Perfect’, ‘Balanced’
language users with full proficiencies in all
their languages.
 No one can learn the entire language system,
whether first, second, or foreign
 No one knows the entire language system
even if it was ‘native’ language/mother
tongue
 Language learning is a life-long process!
The Bilingual Knowledge
 Bilinguals and multilinguals rarely have equal proficiency
in all the languages they know and use, even for the socalled simultaneous bilinguals
 Bilinguals and multilinguals rarely use all their languages
equally in all contexts or to equal level.
 Knowing which language to which to whom and when is
an integral part of being bilingual or multilingual.
 Bilinguals and multilinguals therefore move between
what Grosjean calls ‘language modes’.
Language mode (Grosjean, 1998)
The Bilingual Knowledge
 Codewitching is a defining behaviour of
BEING Bilingual, i.e. in a bilingual mode.
 Codeswitching is about the management of
different language in social interaction - the
most important aspect of the Bilingual
Knowledge.
Codeswitching
 Control, Activation and Resources (David
Green).
 ‘competitive control’ v. ‘open control’ –
 A control process model of code-switching, David W. Green and Li
Wei, 2014, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience (formerly Language
and Cognitive Processes) 29,4: 499-511
Fears of Codeswitching
 Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, 1987, Who’s




afraid of bilingualism?
Parental fears
Teachers’ fears
Cultural fears
Society’s / institutions’ / policies’ fears
 Monolingualism/Linguistic purism –
 OLON / OLAT
Monolingual ideology
affecting research design
 Separation/differentiation is the benchmark
for competence
 Comparisons to monolingual norms

Anatoliy Kharkhurin and Li Wei,2015, The role of codeswitching in bilingual
creativity and selective attention. International Journal of Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism. 18,2: 153-169

Jean-Marc Dewaele and Li Wei, 2013, Is multilingualism linked to a higher
tolerance of ambiguity? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 16.1: 231-240

Jean-Marc Dewaele, 2012, Multilingualism, empathy and multicompetence.
International Journal of Multilingualism 9.4: 352-366
Translanguaging
From Codeswitching to
Translanguaging: A paradigm shift
 Traditional focus on structural constraints and
separation of languages/linguistic structures is
giving way to “integrational” approaches
 Beyond he narrow conceptualization of
‘language’
 Moves/’turns’ to connectivity, fluidity, mobility.
 Knowing lots of different languages - The-morethe-better approach
 Mixing of languages
Two routes to TLAN:
1. Pedagogical approach to bilingual education
 Cen Williams (1994): trawsieithu .
 Colin Baker: ‘translinguifying’ -> translanguaging
(Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism,
2001 )
 a pedagogical practice where one receives information
through the medium of one language (e.g. English) and
gives information through the medium of a different
language (e.g. Welsh).
 It can be practised by both the student and the teacher.
 It helps to maximise the learner’s bilingual ability in
learning.
 An effective pedagogical practice where the
school language or the language-of-instruction is
different from the languages of the learners.
 Breaking ideological divides between indigenous
versus immigrant, majority versus minority, and
target versus mother tongue languages
 Translanguaging empowers both the learner and
the teacher, transforms the power relations and
focuses the process of teaching and learning on
making meaning, enhancing experience and
developing identity (e.g. Garcia, 2009; Creese
and Blackledge, 2015).
 Translanguaging is not conceived as an object or
a linguistic structural phenomenon to describe
and analyse, i.e. not a-thing-in-itself, but a
practice and a process –
 a practice that involves dynamic and
functionally integrated use of different
languages and language varieties through
different modalities
 a process of knowledge construction that goes
beyond, i.e. transcending, the boundaries of
languages
 Role of L1 in second / foreign / additional
language learning
Two routes to TLAN:
2. Languaging
 A.L. Becker (1991) borrowed the term
Languaging from the Chilean biologist and
neuroscientist Humberto Maturana and his coauthor Francesco Varela (1980) and invited us to
think that ‘there is no such thing as Language,
only continual languaging, an activity of
human beings in the world’ (p. 34).
 He reiterated Ortega y Gasset’s (1957) argument
that language should not be regarded ‘as an
accomplished fact, as a thing made and finished,
but as in the process of being made’ (p.242).
Swain on Languaging
and the socio-cultural theory
 the cognitive process of negotiating and producing
meaningful, comprehensible output as part of language
learning as a ‘means to mediate cognition’, i.e. to
understand and to problem-solve (2006, p. 97) and ‘a
process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and
experience through language’ (p. 97).
 advanced second language learners’ cognitive and affective
engagements through languaging whereby ‘language
serves as a vehicle through which thinking is articulated and
transformed into an artifactual form’ (p. 97).
 ‘talking-it-through’ meant ‘coming-to-know-whilespeaking’ (Swain and Lapkin, 2002).
 languaging and thinking, cognizing and consciousness
 How is the thinking process affected by
simultaneous use of multiple languages?
 Beyond advanced second language learners to
include different types of multilingual language
users
 To capture their ‘talking-it-through’ in multiple
languages however incomplete or truncated
their knowledge of the individual languages may
be
 The entirety of the learner’s linguistic repertoire,
rather than knowledge of specific structures of
specific languages separately
Ecological psychology – distributed
cognition
 Languaging: ‘an assemblage of diverse material,
biological, semiotic and cognitive properties and
capacities which languaging agents orchestrate in realtime and across a diversity of timescales’ (Thibault,
2016: 9).
 Nigel Love, Stephen Cowley, Paul Thibault and Sune
Steffensen set out to challenge what they call ‘the code
view’ of language that sought to identify abstract verbal
patterns, morphosyntax or lexicogrammar, divorced
from cognitive, affective, and bodily dynamics in realtime and specify the rules for mapping forms to
meanings and meanings to forms.
 They regard language as a second-order construct, the
product of first order activity, languaging (Cowley, 2016;
Thibault, 2011, 2016; Steffensen, 2001, 2011)
 ‘Human languaging activity is radically
heterogeneous and involves the interaction of
processes on many different time-scales,
including neural, bodily, situational, social, and
cultural processes and events’ (Thilbault, 2016:
3).
 Grant languaging a primacy over what is
languaged!
 Rethink of language not as an organism-centred entity with
corresponding formalism such as phonemes, words, sentences, etc.,
but as ‘a multi-scalar organization of processes that enables the
bodily and the situated to interact with situation, transcending
cultural-historical dynamics and practices’ (Thibault, 2016: 5).
 The divides between the linguistic, the paralinguistic, and the
extralinguistic dimensions of human communication are nonsensical.
 The orchestration of the neural-bodily-worldly skills of languaging.
 The importance of feeling, experience, history, memory, subjectivity
and culture (and ideology and power).
 On language learning:
 the novice does not ‘acquire’ language, but
rather ‘they adapt their bodies and brains to the
languaging activity that surrounds them’.
 In doing so, ‘they participate in cultural worlds
and learn that they can get things done with
others in accordance with the culturally
promoted norms and values’ (Thibault, 2016: 3).
 - language socialization; complex dynamic
system (Duranti, Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011; The
Five Graces Group, 2009).
Adding the Trans prefix to
Languaging
 Better captures multilingual language users’ creative and
dynamic practices
 Two further theoretical arguments:
 (Language and Thought) Multilinguals do not think unilingually,
even when they are in a ‘monolingual mode’ and producing one
language only for a specific stretch of speech or text.
 (Modularity of Mind) Human beings think beyond language,
and thinking requires the use of a variety of cognitive, semiotic,
and modal resources of which language in its conventional
sense of speech and writing is only one.
Translanguaging Instinct (Li Wei,
2016)
 Humans have an innate drive to go beyond narrowly defined
linguistic cues and transcend the culturally defined language
boundaries.
 Cf. ‘principle of economy’ in linguistic theories e.g. the Minimalist
Program, a ‘Principle of Abundance’ is in operation in human
communication in real-life social contexts
 - multiple cues are present simultaneously in producing a message;
human beings have a natural instinct to draw on as many different
sensory, modal cognitive and semiotic resources as available to
them to interpret the meaning intentions whilst assessing the
relative relevance and significance of the different cues
 - cues complement and compensate each other; human beings read
them in a coordinated manner rather than singularly
A Translanguaging view of
Language
 Language as a multilingual,
multisemiotic, multisensory and
multimodal resource for senseand meaning-making.
Translanguaging Learning in
action
 Learning Chinese via online platforms
 With Carey Jewitt, Jeff Bezemer, and Jenifer
Ho
 online learning, mobile learning, self-
learning, informal learning, and on the
learning of Chinese.
 Informal, mobile learning: learning that is undertaken
‘individually or collectively, on our own without
externally imposed criteria or the presence of an
institutionally authorised instructor’ (Livingstone, 2000,
p. 493).
 Digital technology allows individuals to learn ‘on the go’,
making learning flexible and able to be controlled by
individual learners (Selwyn, 2011).
 The Internet opens up the access to education to an
unprecedentedly wide group of audience, with different
‘funds of knowledge’ at their disposal.
 An individual can be a teacher in one setting, and a
learner in another, engaging in the act of knowledge
exchange.
 How individual adult learners of Chinese
engage in self-learning via Memrise.
The learner
 ‘George’ – Australian, early 30s, has been
teaching in China for about 8 months at
timing of recording
 Using Memrise in addition to one-to-one
tuition (spoken Chinese)

At the moment I've got a tutor but I just use Memrise for characters, because
that's kind of my own study. I told her [my tutor] I don't really want her to take
into characters just, just spoken Chinese.

I was also using a programme…which is just like a flashcard
programme….there's a set of basic Mandarin flashcards and I was using that
'cause I can use it on the phone as well, there's a programme for that, so I was
trying to use it for a little bit, but, yeah, a lot of different things

I met a few people when I went to China, the first time. They have given me
their QQ number. So I downloaded QQ once I was back in Australia and they
were sending me messages in Chinese, in characters. And a lot of the time I
was just translating through Google Translate, but also that kind of spur me on
to start learning the characters as well….I didn't really stick with one
thing….over here in China… I started having my tutoring and I found
Memrise…
The video sample
 First 500 Characters in Mandarin Chinese.
或
 Huò
 (perhaps)
Video
 Meaning making, involving carefully orchestrated use of
multiple semiotic and modal resources - constantly
talking to himself, thinking aloud; looking, reading,
moving the mouse; typing; reading the
picture/image/sign; imagining other
pictures/images/signs; create his own sign; trying out the
pronunciation or trying to memorize the pronunciation
and linking the pronunciation with the image/sign and
making connections across meaning, sound and image.
 He is doing meaning-making through two languages,
creating the story in English about a Chinese characters
with bits of information about Chinese radicals that make
up the character embedded in the story.
Methodological challenge
 Multimodal Transcription
 George is Trans-Scripting himself, across
languages and modalities
 Creating a new sign, a sign that the learner
has ownership and full understanding of.
Multimodal Transcription
Transformations
How George transforms
learning
 Meaning: meaning of word x in Chinese (或) ‘is like’




meaning of word y in English (‘perhaps’)
Written form: character (或) ‘is like’ shape of objects
named in English (lance, mouth)
Spoken form: pronunciation of word x (或) ‘is like’
pronunciation of word y in Chinese (火)
Capitalizing words which is related to the target
character
Has to include meaning, written form and spoken form
(pronunciation) in the meme
Summary and Conclusion
 The changing world of language learning -Language learning can
and does take place everywhere, on the street, at work, on holidays,
online, through pop music, computer games, and in some rather
impoverished, dangerous, or traumatic environments too, and at
any time, day and night, in childhood, adulthood and later life or
advanced age.
 Language learning is no longer just for an educational qualification
or status, or for spreading the (western) wisdom and knowledge to
the uncivilized. The purpose of language learning is more likely for
tourism, entertainment, marriage and personal relationships, and in
the case of refugee and other individuals under exploitation, basic
survival.
 Language learning in most of these cases is informal, piecemeal,
mobile, and multimodal.
 Complexities of informal language learning
 Multiplicity of resources - no single source of
knowledge
 Agency and creativity of the learner
Translanguaging and Multi-Competence
 MC concerns the total system for all languages (L1, L2,
Ln) in a single mind or community and their interrelationships – TLAN aims to transcend the boundaries of
named languages.
 MC does not depend on the monolingual native speaker
– TLAN focuses on the multilingual’s everyday practices
and only compares amongst different types of
multilinguals and how different language experiences
impact on their behaviour and cognition.
 MC affects the whole mind, i.e. all language and
cognitive systems, rather than language alone - TLAN
aims to overcome the ‘lingual bias’.
 Translanguaging - the dynamic process whereby
multilingual language users mediate complex social and
cognitive activities through strategic employment of
multiple semiotic resources to act, to know and to be
(Garcia and Li Wei, 2014).
 The Translanguaging perspective aims to
- transcend conventional boundaries between language s,
and between language and other cognitive and semiotic
systems
- highlight the individual’s potential for Creativity and
Criticality
- transform our way of thinking of multilingualism in the
contemporary world of connectivity, mobility,
superdiversity and multimodality
A future challenge
 Translanguaging - an objective for language
learning?
Thank you.
 Li Wei
 UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics
 UCL Institute of Education
 University College London
 Li.wei@ucl.ac.uk