Translanguaging: Origins, Developments, and Future Directions

Translanguaging has emerged in the last two decades as a major theory in applied linguistics that has impacted on policy and practice in a number of fields such as language teaching and learning, bilingual and multilingual education, multi-literacies, language and identity, language attitude, and language and ideology. It has also raised fundamental theoretical questions for language evolution, the nature of human language (the Language Faculty), multimodalities, human cognition and communication. This article, in reviewing the developments of the concept in these sub-fields, explores the key contributions of Translanguaging to language education, applied linguistics and theoretical models of human language and cognition. We examine examples of how the concept is applied in a range of researches and how it has become a 'practical theory' of human language and cognition. We discuss examples of how it has been used in the Chinese context and synthesizes existing research using Translanguaging in studying Chinese and Chinese-related communicative phenomena including language learning and everyday social interaction in diverse contexts. We will map out what we see as the future directions of Translanguaging research, with particular reference to China, in order to promote new research in the Chinese context.