Indonesia has more than 700 languages, with Bahasa Indonesia (or simply Bahasa) being the official one. From the westernmost Sabang in...

Bilingualism is difficult to define. We often go with a feeling more than anything. That person is bilingual. I’d like to be bilingual,...

I was born and raised during a golden era of English language education in China. By the time I was in the third grade, English had become a compulsory subject in our curriculum. However, many children were exposed to English even before that, through extracurricular classes. I was one of them. At just five years old, my parents enrolled me in a weekend English training program.   The 2008 Beijing Olympics elevated the English language to unprecedented prominence in China. ‘E

Have you ever secretly thought that people invent a term so it sounds like something new and exciting, but it’s actually no different to an existing term? Terminological confusion happens a lot when ideas become popular and people embrace them in different ways.  But I’d like to argue for a term that has been accused of this: translanguaging . The term that already exists? Code-switching .   We have had the idea of code-switching - switching between ‘codes’ or languages - for

Navigating language use in the classroom can be challenging.

In this entry, I’m going to talk about the differences between translation and translanguaging and whether or not these two notions can...

When I was young, Japanese happened to me at school. It was external to me, geographically distant. I was here and Japanese was there. I...