Playful translanguaging: Capturing affective language learning experiences in a multilingual classroom

This article surfaces the experiential and affective qualities of classroom discourse in a multilingual setting. We foreground the concept of “playful translanguaging,” or the social, often humorous and spontaneous use of diverse linguistic and semiotic resources that blurs conventional boundaries between languages, play and learning, and between teacher-student roles. While the field of multilingual education has tended to focus on translanguaging as a tool for learning concepts and content, here we explore the relational potential role of translingual play in classrooms. We examine three connected episodes within a single lesson involving intermediate-age multilingual students in a public school, during which the teacher’s Spanish pronunciation sparked a linguistically unexpected and playful interaction worthy of further investigation. Through a discourse-analytic approach, we emphasize key features of playful translanguaging such as elements of embodiment, norm relaxation, and affective spread that deepen the relational dimensions of this pedagogical conceptualization. Through this analysis, we began to broaden the lens on multilingual classrooms and consider what else, aside from supporting academic achievement and engagement, translanguaging offers to a learning space. In doing so, we will illustrate how playful translanguaging can also function as an affective, relational activity that shapes the ways language, power, and emotion interface in these classroom settings.