Translanguaging as a Heritage Language Maintenance Strategy

Abstract

This chapter presents a multilingual autoethnography that emerged in the process of doing a research project on heritage language maintenance in Canada. This autoethnography is about a culturally and linguistically mixed family where a young child is trying to navigate and intuitively use the right language with the right people at the right place, at the same time developing her insatiable desire to experiment with new words, sentences, and narratives. Using all three languages from her linguistic repertoire, this child illustrates some possibilities of translanguaging at a very young age. Besides significant and well-documented pedagogical benefits of translanguaging, the author's attempt in this chapter is also to present a new aspect of translanguaging as one of the possible heritage language maintenance strategies among immigrant families.