Translingual innovation within contact zones: lessons from Australian and South African schools

In this chapter, the authors undertake a contrastive study on translingual innovation across two very different contexts: South African township schooling, where the majority of children speak languages other than English yet are taught and tested in English, and Australian urban schooling, where newly arrived students are immersed in English language instruction to prepare them for mainstream schooling. The authors make a case for plurilingual pedagogies to be viewed as “placed resources”, and for teachers working in such sites to view their work as occurring within “contact zones”, where cultures come together in social spaces characterised by unequal power relationships.