Creating translanguaging spaces in students' academic writing practices

Postgraduates increasingly write in multilingual contexts. Studies have focused on developing bilingual expertise or harnessing expressions of writer identity. Yet, the role of students' linguistic ideologies and their writing experiences has so far not been problematised. Based on Busch's sociolinguistic model of linguistic repertoire (2012), this paper investigates how students develop their academic writing across language codes and registers in the multilingual contexts of a Swedish university. The qualitative, longitudinal study presents data from two students including interviews based on the students' written text relating to their master's thesis. Findings show that students' linguistic ideologies and their experiences can enable or restrict their capacity to draw on their varied repertoires. When enabled, students create translanguaging spaces for meaning making in collaboration with peers and institutional actors. I argue that the metaphor of translanguaging space can be fruitfully applied as a pedagogic tool. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.