Language ideologies in Swedish for immigrants – Is there a space for pedagogical translanguaging in basic literacy education for adults?

This paper focuses on the articulated and practiced language policies (Bonacina-Pugh 2013) of two Swedish for immigrants (sfi) teachers. Sfi is a language programme that provides basic second language education in Swedish for adult immigrants resident in Sweden. In addition, basic literacy education is provided for adult immigrants who are not yet functionally literate.

The paper explores language ideologies articulated by the teachers and embodied in their teaching practices (Kroskrity 2006; Ganuza & Hedman 2017). It asks if there is a space for pedagogical translanguaging in basic literacy education for adults within sfi.  Interviews with the teachers and classroom observations were performed in the context of the ongoing project Digital literacy practices in everyday life and in basic literacy education (DigPrac) which focuses on multilingualism in relation to the use of digital media. In the DigPrac study, the understandings of literacy are influenced by the research fields New Literacy Studies (Barton 2007) and Critical Literacy (Janks 2010) and by a meeting of the fields of socioculturally grounded literacy research with research on translanguaging (Li Wei 2011; Creese & Blackledge 2015). The analysis starts outs from Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2010; Rogers 2011).

Preliminary findings indicate that there is a complex interplay between competing monolingual and multilingual language ideologies. An "only Swedish in the classroom" ideology is competing with a "students' L1s welcome in the classroom" ideology.