International Journal of Bilingual Education and

Bilingualism

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Reflections on Turnbull’s reframing of foreign

language education: bilingual epistemologies

Ofelia García

To cite this article: Ofelia García (2017): Reflections on Turnbull’s reframing of foreign
language education: bilingual epistemologies, International Journal of Bilingual Education and
Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2016.1277512

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1277512

Published online: 15 Jan 2017.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1277512

COMMENTARY

Reflections on Turnbull’s reframing of foreign language education:

bilingual epistemologies
Ofelia García
Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this article I reflect on Turnbull’s reframing of foreign language Received 21 December 2016
education through a bilingual framework. I argue that in order for this Accepted 23 December 2016
important shift to be generative, foreign language education must shed
KEYWORDS
the strong link between language and nation-state that has been at Bilingualism; emergent
the core of foreign language epistemologies. That is, foreign language bilingual; foreign language
education must give up on being a mechanism of political states, education; native speaker;
focusing instead on speakers. Keeping with an epistemology that is both second language; types of
critical and poststructuralist, this article tries to uncover the modernist language education
assumptions and categorizations about language learners, language and
bilingualism, and language programs, which have been partially
responsible for the failure of language education, in its many forms,
to achieve its full potential. The article also tries to unmask, in a
Foucauldian sense, the reasons for the maintenance of the categories
that are at the core of language education programs, especially L1/L2,
and native/second/new speaker. It argues that there is need for all
language education programs to build multilingual subjectivities that are
legitimate, without reference to the social construction of native
speakers, or that of sanctioned named languages.

Turnbull makes an important contribution to language education in this article, discussing and study-
ing foreign language education through a bilingual framework. In so doing, Turnbull has moved
foreign language scholarship into the twenty-first century, taking up the issue of bilingualism as
his own, and reclaiming foreign language education’s role in promoting bilingualism. This shift is
important, for foreign language education has an important role in the promotion of bilingualism,
especially for language majorities. But as I argue below, in order for this shift to be generative for
language learning and teaching, assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that
are prevalent in language education have to be questioned.
In this short response, graciously requested by the editor, Jean-Marc Dewaele, I offer my support
for the positioning of foreign language education as a form of bilingual education and within a bilin-
gual paradigm. At the same time, I warn that in order to transform foreign language education, it will
have to shed the strong link between language and nation-state that has been at the core of foreign
language epistemologies. That is, foreign language education has been constructed as the teaching
of a separate alien language that belongs to a distant nation with a distinct culture. For foreign
language education to enter the bilingual education realm, it would have to give up on being a mech-
anism of political states, and focus instead on speakers. This response addresses some of the ways in
which this can be done.

CONTACT Ofelia García ogarcia@gc.cuny.edu

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 O. GARCÍA

I start by considering why applied linguistics has not presented an integrated theory of language
education for the twenty-first century. I also reflect on the shifts in language learners and language
practices that have led to the proliferation of different categories of language education programs in
the twenty-first century and argue that we must develop overarching theories of language education
and practice.
I then try to uncover the modernist assumptions about language learners, language and bilingu-
alism, and language education programs, which have been partially responsible for the failure of
language education, in its many forms, to achieve its full potential. Keeping with an epistemology
that is both critical and poststructuralist, I speak back to some of the arguments made by Turnbull
in the hopes that we can together reframe language education programs so that they can contribute
to giving voice to the many.

Beyond the divisions of applied linguistics

A problem with applied linguistics scholarship is that it often emerges from the practical realities of
language education programs. Theories thus develop in truncated ways, often tied to different
language learners, social contexts, curricula, programs, and practices, rather than starting with the
underlying principles of language learning and teaching. This is certainly the problem with what
we label today as foreign language education, the subject of Turnbull’s article, but it is also the
issue that surrounds the many forms of language education that are being promoted today – bilin-
gual education in its many forms, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), foreign language
education, heritage language education, immersion education, second language education, etc. Each
of these activities, developed because of diverse societal and educational goals for different popu-
lations, then also acquires scholars, professional journals, and conferences. These undertakings
then constitute themselves into different scholarly fields. Teachers are educated and credentialed
or certified solely as foreign language teachers, teachers of a second language (usually of the domi-
nant language of a particular nation-state), or bilingual education teachers. Scholars rarely cross the
imaginary disciplinary line of what have been constructed as different language education fields (for
an important exception, see Hélot and de Mejía 2008).
The effort of Turnbull to take up a bilingual framework for foreign language education is most
important. Scholarship on bilingualism cannot be restricted solely to bilingual education and must
encompass not only foreign language education, but also all the language education programs
named above. After all, these efforts aim to develop bilingual speakers, and so bilingualism must
be at the center of all language education scholarship. Of course, the approaches and methodologies
that we follow in the different educational programs may differ because they must respond to the
local conditions of education systems and the contexts that support them. But I argue below that
it would do us well as applied linguists to recognize that the fabricated divisions of traditional
language education disciplines have begun to crumble, given the increased diversity of language
learners and linguistic practices that are evident today. We must proactively leverage these trends
and shifts as an opportunity to extend a different type of language education. I start by questioning
the categories of language learners that we have constructed as a profession.

Beyond categories of language learners and types of programs

The disciplinary division of language education programs into different fields – foreign language,
bilingual education, heritage language education, immersion education, CLIL, etc. – does not make
sense in a globalized world characterized by mass movements of people, information, goods, and
texts across different national contexts. As the linguistically complex nature of our globalized
world becomes more visible, and as hegemonic Western epistemologies confront subaltern ones
in the same space, traditional education programs for bilingualism that target only one type of
student considered to have one linguistic and lived experience are not appropriate.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 3

Most language education programs suffer from what I have called a bilingual monoglossic ideol-
ogy, that is, the assumption that all students are monolingual and have one worldview, start from the
same sociolinguistic and sociopolitical position, and are acquiring another autonomous distinct
language associated with an ‘other’ group or a distinct national territory (García 2009). The foreign
language education programs of the twentieth century were products of these monoglossic
nation-state ideologies. Foreign languages were taught as autonomous and separate wholes that
were never to be part of the learner’s identity and that belonged to dominant nation-states. Begin-
ning learners were assumed to be monolingual in the official language of the nation-state, since only
the dominant class had access to the secondary education in which those other languages were most
often taught. And with the exception of classical languages – Latin and Greek – those ‘other’ foreign
languages were European ones – French, German, English, Italian and Spanish.
The same bilingual monoglossic ideology was then perpetuated in the new language education
programs that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, as the world responded to the growing voices
of discontent by indigenous and regional language minorities whose language practices had always
been excluded in schools. The linguistic struggles that had been suppressed, but that had always
been present within the same nation-state territories, were now coming into view.
In Québec, as the Parti Québécois gained ascendency in the 1970s, French was declared the offi-
cial language of the province in a country where English and French had been given equal status in
1969. For dominant Anglophones, the Immersion bilingual education programs that were shaped
during this era provided a way to guarantee their continuing position of power and their intact
Anglophone identity, while French was simply added, this time as a second (and not foreign)
language. What was constituted as an L2 was added to what was normalized as the learners’ L1,
always differentiating and separating the two languages and ensuring that French continued to
be perceived by the Anglophone students as only their second language.
This monoglossic ideology also shaped the transitional bilingual education programs that started
to be developed in the US in the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the Canadian immersion programs,
the goal of transitional bilingual education in the US was the transitioning of students considered to
be Spanish-speaking monolinguals to English monolingualism. These transitional bilingual education
programs in the early 1970s served mostly the many poor Mexican American and Puerto Rican US
citizens who had been miseducated in the segregationist educational system of the time. As with
immigrants of earlier times, the US would not tolerate languages other than English, but for these
brown students, English was to be just a second language. In these transitional bilingual education
programs the students’ first language was subtracted, but they were left with English as a second
language, which was not to be their own.
Even if language education programs promoted bilingualism as a goal (as in foreign language, and
immersion bilingual programs), or used children’s home languages as a medium of instruction (as in
transitional bilingual education programs), students in these new language education programs that
emerged in the mid-twentieth century were taught as monolingual learners, and instruction pro-
ceeded as if the ‘other’ language and what was also constructed as another separate culture never
touched the students’ true identity. Bilingualism was seen, as Lambert (1974) taught us, as either
additive (as in immersion bilingual education programs for language majorities) or subtractive (as
in transitional bilingual education programs for language minorities).
Throughout history, there have always been efforts by different minoritized ethnolinguistic groups
to teach their own children by leveraging their own linguistic and cultural practices. These efforts
have taken place, most of the time, outside of the recognized nation-state educational system. Eth-
nolinguistic groups whose language practices were excluded from the dominant school system have
often established alternative schools, sometimes underground. This was the case, for example, of the
Ikastolas in the Basque Country, and of the Māori-controlled schools in New Zealand. These edu-
cational efforts, often taking place in after-school or weekend classes (what Fishman 1966, called
ethnic schools, Creese and Blackledge 2010, called complementary schools, and García, Zakharia,
and Otcu 2013, called bilingual community schools) always recognized the group’s bilingual
4 O. GARCÍA

language practices and the positioning of the learners along all points of a bilingual continuum.
Unlike the programs in the dominant educational systems established and funded by governments
of nation-states in which the language-minoritized children lived, the objective in these programs
was to develop an identity that recognized bilingualism as more than simply two autonomous
languages that belonged to two different political states. Monoglossic ideologies about bilingualism
and concepts of additive or subtractive bilingualism started to be disrupted through these efforts of
language-minoritized communities, efforts that occurred at what was considered simply ‘the
borders’.
As extensive migrations of people, as well as a neoliberal economy, disrupted the autonomy of
nation-states, it also upset the bilingual monoglossic ideology of traditional language education pro-
grams. The linguistic diversity that had been hidden from view was now aboveground and visible. For
example, students in foreign language education programs around the world today are now often
speakers or hearers of those languages at home, in their families and communities. Most students
in Canadian French immersion programs today are students who are speakers of other languages
beyond English, and many are Francophone. Bilingual education programs in the US now serve
not just long-standing Spanish-speaking communities. They also serve the many immigrants from
Africa, Asia, and Latin America that came after the abolition of the strict national origin quota that
had favored immigrants from northern and western Europe prior to 1968. And these programs
increasingly include the simultaneous bilingual children born in the US into bilingual families that
are now beating the odds of the traditional US generational language shift to English by the third
generation.
The greater value of dominant languages in the linguistic market, especially of English, has also
impacted the type of language learners in language education programs. These learners of English
are now rarely homogeneous in sociopolitical or sociolinguistic background or lived experience.
The response of scholars and educators to this greater diversity of language learners has not
always been to debunk the monoglossic ideologies of additive bilingualism and embrace the hetero-
glossic ideologies of a dynamic bilingualism (García 2009). Instead many more program categories
have come into being. In the face of the greater diversity of language learners and practices, and
the disruption of bilingualism as just not simply additive (L1 + L2 = L1 + L2) or subtractive (L1 +
L2 – L1 = L2), we have continued to categorize learners and multiplied types of programs. Traditional
foreign language education programs and its accompanying scholarship have been divided into
foreign language education and heritage language education. But the greater diversity of language
practices among students has not been able to be contained within these two categories. Thus, in
reality, programs for heritage language speakers have a broad range of speakers – those considered
to speak the language from birth, those who speak the language at home, those who only hear it at
home, those whose ancestors spoke the language but who don’t anymore – and it is not often easy to
determine whether students are better served in foreign language or heritage language classrooms.
As the European Union clamored for the plurilingualism of its citizens, traditional core foreign
language education was deemed not to be enough. The emphasis became not simply the teaching
of a language as foreign and focusing on its structure, but on its authentic use in another academic
subject. A bilingual pedagogy, often modeled after immersion bilingual programs, was adopted in
what became known as CLIL programs. Foreign language education was also now split into tra-
ditional core foreign language programs and CLIL.
Finally, as bilingual education programs became more accepted as a viable way of promoting
bilingualism, they were subjected to some of the same monoglossic attempts to keep the population
stable and the languages separate. In the US, prior to the federal government’s support of bilingual
education in 1968, some Latino and Native American groups in different communities had organized
what were then considered maintenance bilingual education programs. But when in the 1974
reauthorization of The Bilingual Education Act the US federal government defined bilingual edu-
cation as transitional, the goal of instruction became English. Once the neoliberal economy
created a linguistic market for other languages in the US, most especially Spanish and Mandarin
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 5

Chinese, ways had to be found to teach these languages to English-speaking children. At the same
time, many bilingual Americans started to demand that schools develop their children’s bilingualism
and biliteracy. Two-way Dual language programs (interestingly enough not named bilingual because
of the progressive silencing of bilingualism in the US, see García 2009) became a way of linguistically
engineering an educational program where 50% of the students were to be those categorized as
English learners, but the other 50% were to be students classified as English speakers. Despite assess-
ments that render students as belonging to these two categories, the lines are much more blurred.
The supposedly English speakers are many times multilingual or bilingual; whereas those classified as
English learners are many times simultaneous bilinguals who have grown up in homes with bilingual
practices. And in the face of opposition and even illegality of bilingual education in some US states,
many minoritized groups have found ways of using what are called dual language programs as cover
for developmental bilingual education programs that recognize the linguistic diversity in the
language-minoritized community.
Despite the historical tradition that separates language education programs into foreign, heritage,
second, CLIL, and bilingual, we will only be able to move language education to the forefront if we
see it as a common effort to develop the bilingual and multilingual capacities of ALL speakers. Turn-
bull has recognized this. Bilingualism and biliteracy are worthwhile goals of all language education
programs, but we cannot continue to divide ourselves into disciplines that only respond to tradition,
rather than to the students who we are teaching today and their heteroglossic language practices,
the subject of the next section.

Beyond dichotomies that normalize

Even as the students in our various language education programs exhibit a range of diverse language
practices, language education programs in government funded schools continue to behave as if stu-
dents speak a standardized L1 to which another standardized L2 or L3 can be then added or as if
minoritized students’ L1 can be subtracted and substituted by a permanent L2.
All language education programs that aim to teach what is considered another language rarely
accept language practices that are different from those touted as the monolingual standard,
which was constructed to mirror the language practices of a dominant elite in a specific geographic
territory. The teacher, the grammar books, the dictionary are seen as the only authoritative bodies of
the language, and those practices are then normalized. Language education programs then compare
the performances of the learners to what has been constructed as the norm. These second language
speakers or in the new parlance, new language speakers, can never become native speakers. The con-
struction of native speaker serves as the norm against which the new speakers are judged. As
language learners compare their language performances against what is considered the only
norm in schools, they construct subjectivities of themselves as being deficient language learners
and speakers. These discursive constructions of L1/L2, as well as native/second/new speaker are par-
tially responsible for what is seen as the failure of many language education programs.
For language-minoritized populations, monolingual education is often the only recourse, respon-
sible for much of their academic failure. The normalization of the standard language of the nation-
state, constructed to mirror the language practices of the dominant elite (considered, above all,
the important mother tongue, the first language, the L1), has been an important technique to min-
oritize students, racialize them and linguicize them as ‘the other’. Monolingual education, including
second language programs for those considered second language speakers, negate the bilingual
lived reality of language-minoritized students and obscure the effects of minoritization and racializa-
tion of these students by a powerful majority. That is, they obscure the effects of what Quijano (1997)
has called the coloniality of power.
Taking a page from monolingual education models, all language education programs, including
bilingual education programs to teach language-minoritized students, continue to uphold the
dichotomies of L1/L2 and of native/ second language speakers without considering the
6 O. GARCÍA

normalization effect that this has had. A corollary of this is that educational programs continue to
separate what they consider to be native and second language speakers, and pedagogies persist
in separating what is judged to be the L1 from the L2. And yet, fissures have emerged in the tra-
ditional models of language education and their pedagogies, as the divergent practices of multilin-
gual speakers have made evident that the regime of language imposed in schools is not authentic,
but socially constructed to consolidate the power of dominant groups.
Language education scholars are often trapped in modernist constructions of language and
nation-state that continue to operate today in neoliberal theories about commodification of
language learning. If we are going to move language education scholarship beyond the artificial dis-
ciplines that we have created, and the artificial dichotomies prevalent in the discourse of our pro-
fession, we need to question the modernist assumptions of language learners, language and
bilingualism, and language education programs. Turnbull rightly moves foreign language education
into a bilingual future, but below I discuss how he falls short in taking up a critical poststructuralist
epistemology that I believe is essential to disrupt the assumptions under which we have been
working. Bringing the critical and the poststructuralist together does not mean that we will be
able to resolve the epistemological conflict that underlies language education, but it offers a step
toward disrupting the violence that underlies the system of regimes and rules in language education
today, as well as unmasking the role that power has had in normalizing such a regime.

Emergent bilinguals in language education

Turnbull makes an important contribution by insisting that the term emergent bilingual refer also to
learners in foreign language classrooms. This disrupts the construction of students who are learning
another language as second language learners, thus blurring the lines between the established con-
cepts of L1 and L2. The emergent bilingual concept is also consonant with Cook’s important contri-
bution of multicompetence that argues that bilinguals cannot be considered simply two monolinguals
in one, a concept debunked long ago by Grosjean (1982). Bilingual and multilingual individuals are
unique and are much more than the sum of two languages. And Turnbull’s adoption of the term
emergent bilinguals to describe students in foreign language education programs is an important
step to disrupt the dichotomies of the past that have led to much failure in learning languages.
Turnbull rightly points out that they are extending the ways in which I used the term emergent
bilingual in García and Kleifgen (2010). In that text, the term emergent bilingual was upheld in oppo-
sition to Limited English Proficient (LEP) or English Language Learner (ELL), terms that reified the
dichotomies of English and the other language on the one hand, and learner and proficient on
the other. I offered the term emergent bilingual as the accountability movement unleashed by No
Child Left Behind (2002) and its technique of standardized language testing was in full swing. This
was also a time when the term bilingualism was silenced and bilingual education came under
attack. Since then, many scholars and educators in the US have adopted the term emergent bilingual
as a way of naming the reality of those learners who are constantly being measured against those
considered native English speakers. In so doing, it opens up a space of possibility for bilingualism,
as educators are reminded that even by teaching only in English these students are becoming bilin-
gual. Bilingualism is not just of interest to bilingual educators but to all educators. The goal of
language education for emergent bilinguals in the US is not simply ‘native English proficiency’, but
adequate bilingual performances.
As a scholar and educator, I have always been most interested in the sociolinguistics of bilingual
education (in a Fishmanian sense), and especially in the education of language-minoritized students
in the context in which I live and work – the US. However, in considering the many different contexts
of bilingual education in a globalized world in 2009, I defined the term emergent bilingual saying: ‘We
use the term “emergent bilingual” to refer to all students who are in the process of moving along a
bilingual continuum’ (see Chapter 2, note 2). It is only when talking about the US context, and in
describing transitional bilingual education programs that I define emergent bilingual as ‘language
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 7

minority children who are in the process of acquiring English in school’ (178). Since then, I have also
used emergent bilingual in describing students learning languages other than English in bilingual
programs that are known in the US as two-way dual language programs. In García, Johnson, and
Seltzer (2017) we say:
Our use of the term emergent bilingual in this book includes students who are officially designated by schools as
‘English language learners (“ELLs”),’ as well as English speakers who are learning other languages (e.g. Spanish,
Arabic, Mandarin). (2)

In a sense, English-speaking students who are learning another language in two-way dual language
bilingual classroom are the same as those that Turnbull finds in what are called foreign language edu-
cation. The extension of the term emergent bilingual to all learners in foreign language education
programs, as well as all language education programs, is particularly appropriate.
That the emergence of bilingualism today is not limited to formal school programs, a claim made
by Turnbull, is particularly valid. Today’s emergent bilinguals are the product of social interactions in
street and communities with other speakers, as well as with technology and other multimodal means
of communication. As linguistic communities of practice lose the former territorial limitation of
speech communities, interactions with many who speak differently are possible. And the proliferation
of language education programs on the web – for example, Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, Rosetta
Stone, etc., as well as the many teachers who are developing language learning websites – make
it possible for emergent bilinguals to engage in listening, speaking, reading, and writing a new
language in the privacy of their home, with anonymous speakers. Furthermore, the capacity of
video-calling technology also enables connections with speakers in different contexts and situations.
Individuals are also able to now use translation software to engage in reading, writing, and even
speaking another language. Technology and globalization have revolutionized the way we teach
and learn languages. Just as the boundaries of nation-states have expanded, so have our understand-
ings of language education.
I agree with Turnbull that language education can no longer be restricted to the school. But it is
equally important to unmask in a Foucauldian sense how school systems have constructed the native
norm in ways that exclude emergent bilinguals and turns them into failures. Emergent bilinguals in
schools and their teachers need to be agentive and value success as performances along a bilingual
continuum that is always shifting. Linguistic performances should be assessed only in relationship to
the speakers’ specific action and the success of its communicative intent.
Although I agree fully with Turnbull about the inception of emergent bilingualism as the moment
the speaker starts his or her language journey, whether in school, in communities, or at home, I don’t
believe that there is ever an end point. Our performances are considered emergent or not, depending
on the task that we are asked to perform, with which resources, in which modalities, and for which
listeners. Being read as a proficient speaker depends not on our linguistic performances, but on lis-
teners. As Flores and Rosa (2015) have pointed out, listeners have a most important role in determin-
ing who speaks appropriately in different circumstances. Normalizing the use of the term emergent
bilingual and models of bilingualism which value the ever-expanding bilingual repertoire can help
reframe not just speakers’ conceptions of their own language performances, but also listeners’
frames for how they perceive others’ use of language, what Bakhtin (1981) calls, ‘the consciousness
of the listener’.
Language education programs in schools are important because they act as socialization into
language learning. The ideologies present in schools’ language education policies shape the subjec-
tivities of emergent bilinguals as both speakers and listeners. Language education programs with a
monoglossic bilingual ideology harm, rather than help, emergent bilingual learners, for they con-
struct them as failed speakers and harsh listeners. In contrast, programs with heteroglossic bilingual
ideologies that validate the different language practices of emergent bilinguals and that do not hold
up the native speaker as the norm can shape the subjectivities of learners to be flexible bilingual
speakers and generous listeners.
8 O. GARCÍA

Because of the authority vested in it by the nation-state, the school is a most important site for
subject construction. Thus, it often even supersedes the family and the community. It is then most
important that the school language education programs which children attend understand their
power in shaping students’ subjectivities as emergent bilinguals capable of dynamic bilingual per-
formances, and what Bezemer and Kress (2016) call generosity of recognition towards the linguistic
performances of others. Recognizing subaltern epistemologies about language and bilingualism
would be important ways of doing so, and it is to that topic that I turn next.

Bilingualism and language revisited

Although Turnbull extends the conceptualization of emergent bilinguals, he often falls back on the
modernist conceptualizations of speakers as native/second/foreign, and languages as first/second,
that the positioning of learners as emergent bilinguals tries to deconstruct. For example, Turnbull
defines emergent bilingualism as ‘the ongoing process of gaining language knowledge and develop-
ing L2 skills as a potential resource for making and convening meaning in situations relevant to the
individual speaker’s situation’ (my italics). But a critical poststructuralist perspective takes exception
to this definition, since it reifies what is considered to be the named language, the L2, instead of also
acknowledging the complex linguistic repertoire of the emergent bilingual. There are two issues that
are at the heart of the differences between Turnbull’s conceptualization of the issues and mine – his
understandings of bilingualism and his understanding of language. Work on translanguaging, which I
have perhaps best explained theoretically with colleagues in García and Li Wei (2014) and Otheguy,
García, and Reid (2015), and developed for practice in García, Johnson, and Seltzer (2017) and García
and Kleyn (2016) explains the difference in conceptualizations of bilingualism and language between
Turnbull and me. I address those differences below.
Turnbull rightly brings back a bilingual perspective in considering foreign language education,
pointing to the difference between what he calls a monolingual perspective that sees second
language speakers from the point of view of monolingual native speakers, and a bilingual perspective
that sees them from the point of view of speakers of two or more languages. In so doing, Turnbull
agrees with the notion of multicompetence posited by Cook who noted that competence is more
than the sum of the languages that bilinguals speak because the different languages a person
speaks form one connected system. And yet, Turnbull at times falls back on the notion of additive
bilingualism, where one language is added whole to the speaker’s first language, instead of recogniz-
ing the dynamic bilingualism that makes up a speakers’ linguistic repertoire.
I believe that translanguaging theory goes one step beyond what Turnbull is positing here, and
perhaps also beyond Cook’s concept of multicompetence, for in Cook’s connected system the differ-
ent languages are left intact. Turnbull repeats Cook’s (2016) definition of multicompetence as ‘the
overall system of a mind or a community that uses more than one language’ (my italics). Translangua-
ging, however, relies on the idea so convincingly argued by Makoni and Pennycook (2007) that
named languages have been an invention of the nation-state. The challenge, of course, is to think
whether then language education, as presently constituted, would have any value, since its goal is
precisely to teach named languages. As Makoni and Pennycook (2007) also make evident, named
languages have had very real material effects in the lives of people. Teaching then these named
languages is an important social endeavor, especially in our globalized world. But it is most important
for language educators and scholars to understand that there is a difference between this external
view of named languages as a social construction or invention that normalizes the language practices
of the elite while excluding others, and the internal language system of the speaker (Otheguy, García,
and Reid 2015). Named languages exist as social constructs, but they have no reality in the minds of
speakers, in their internal linguistic system, a system, of course, that has been forged in social inter-
action. Only by understanding this difference will language scholars and educators be able to disrupt
the linguistic hierarchies that language education has so long upheld, most often acting on behalf of
nation-states and their languages, instead of on behalf of speakers and children.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 9

Critical poststructural sociolinguists have moved away from Gumperz’ (1964) definition of the lin-
guistic repertoire as the accepted ways of formulating messages of speech communities to what
Blommaert (2010) calls the ‘mobile resources of individual subjects’. A person’s linguistic repertoire
is made up not of whole languages or dialects (which are social external categories), but of lexical
and structural features that make up the speaker’s idiolect, shaped in social interaction. Speakers
then deploy items from their own personal linguistic repertoire selectively as resources to make
meaning. The selection of some features and not others also depends on the nature of the interlo-
cutor, the context, and the history of linguistic exchanges.
Emergent bilinguals in language learning contexts add new features to their linguistic repertoire. It
is only when they appropriate them into their own language repertoire (and not just as a separate
second language, i.e. someone else’s) that they can use them, always in interaction with the other
features of their entire language repertoire.
Bilinguals do not have two bounded whole languages in their repertoire; they have linguistic fea-
tures that they learn to suppress or activate because they become adept at evaluating the commu-
nicative situation at hand. In unmonitored situations, as in interactions with other bilinguals in
families and communities, bilinguals actively use most of the features of their linguistic repertoire
(excepting, of course, those they do not consider appropriate because of style or provenance). In
monitored situations, however, such as those in which they have to communicate with monolingual
speakers of one named language or in school programs in which students are asked to perform only
with features of what is seen as one named language or the other, bilingual speakers and learners
activate only those features that are socially accepted and suppress the rest of the features of
their linguistic repertoire.
Translanguaging theory differentiates between named languages as external social constructions
– English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, etc. – and the internal linguistic repertoire of language users.
Both perspectives are, of course, important. Language education programs pay attention to the
teaching of named languages, and that is an important endeavor. But to do so in socially just ways
requires that language educators differentiate between the external social construction of a
named language and the internal linguistic repertoire of the speaker. Learning to speak an additional
language (the external social reality) requires engagement not just with the external social reality of
speakers (the sociolinguistic context), but also with the learner’s full linguistic repertoire (their internal
psycholinguistic reality). It is in the interaction between the external named languages in society and
the internal language in the mind of the speaker that language learning takes place.
In translanguaging terms, what the emergent bilingual is acquiring is not simply, as Turnbull says,
‘knowledge of a second language’. Emergent bilinguals are acquiring features that are said to socially
belong to another named language, but that they must appropriate as their own into their unitary
language system. Emergent bilinguals in language education programs are also learning which fea-
tures are appropriate to use when and with whom, so that they can engage in different acts of sup-
pression and activation depending on the social interaction in which they are engaged. As long as
language learning is conceptualized as L2 skills, we will be left with L2 learners, and not with emer-
gent bilinguals who are constructing and expanding their own bilingual repertoire. The bilingualism
that learners acquire is not simply additive or dual, but unitary.

Language education programs revisited

Turnbull opens up foreign language education programs and their pedagogies in ways that are gen-
erative. On the one hand, he claims foreign language education is bilingual education, arguing that
the other language needs to be used as medium of education and not solely be the subject of
language education. On the other hand, he convincingly argues for cross-linguistic pedagogies, lever-
aging the entire linguistic repertoire of emergent bilinguals, and not focusing on the sole use of what
he calls the target language of instruction. These are important steps that have the potential to
change the nature of foreign language education programs. But in not adopting the
10 O. GARCÍA

conceptualizations of critical poststructuralist scholarship about language and bilingualism described

above, foreign language education is not fully transformed.
When I wrote my 2009 book, core foreign language education programs were left out because in
contrast to all types of bilingual programs, the other language was not used as a medium of edu-
cation, but instead was taught as a subject. In that book, however, CLIL was considered a form of bilin-
gual education. Now Turnbull has transformed the definition of foreign language education in
claiming that CLIL are foreign language programs that use the target language as medium of instruc-
tion. The change in conceptualization of what core foreign language programs do is very welcomed.
It indeed starts disrupting the different categories of language education programs that have prolif-
erated in the linguistic market of today. But I am not certain that given the supremacy that Turnbull
assigns to foreign language education, he would be willing to blur what have been constituted as
different fields.
Another welcomed change in foreign language education that Turnbull proposes is the use of
what we might call cross-linguistic strategies. Notice that I am not calling these translanguaging ped-
agogies. For me, translanguaging pedagogies are instructional practices that start by acknowledging
the full linguistic repertoire of the learner, while at the same time recognizing the social categories of
named languages. Turnbull disrupts monolingual pedagogies in teaching for bilingualism, but yet
maintain the invention of named languages. In many ways Turnbull brings us closer to a future
that recognizes bilingualism in all endeavors, and especially in all language education endeavors.
And yet, he leaves undisturbed the epistemologies of language and bilingualism that have been
responsible for the construction of bilinguals as incomplete and of emergent bilinguals as failures.
For language education to promote a bilingual future that is socially just for all, those assumptions
have to be questioned.

Conclusion
Foreign language education in Turnbull’s article leaps beyond the conceptual strictures in which it
has been kept. That is a good thing. But it might be time to push beyond simply extending the defi-
nition of one particular type of language education program.
Language education programs in schools will never be able to constitute bilingual subjectivities
unless they start and end with a dynamic bilingual perspective. The external manifestations of
language education school programs may be many, as they adjust to local conditions. But all
language education programs must rest on ways of building multilingual subjectivities that are legit-
imate and authorized, without reference to the social construction of native speakers, or that of sanc-
tioned named languages.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Ofelia García is professor in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures and
languages at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. García has published widely in the areas of multilingu-
alism and education, sociology of language and language policy. She is the editor of The International Journal of the
Sociology of Language and co-edits Language Policy (with H. Kelly-Holmes).

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