‘That was crazy’: Confronting monolingual ideologies and courting translanguaging in international telecollaboration

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In a telecollaboration (or ‘virtual exchange’) between teacher candidates (TCs) from Türkiye and the United States (U.S.), U.S. TCs experience various elements of translingual practice as potential challenge to their monolingual backgrounds. The challenges occur as TCs from the U.S. context work to fulfill, with Turkish assistance, collaborative final projects: a K-6 learning resource in the form of ‘kamishibai’, digital story, or translanguaging children’s book. Analysis in the article draws on various data sources, including the final projects, recorded video interactions between U.S. and Turkish TCs, and written reflections by U.S. TCs. The analysis aims to answer the following research questions: (1) How have the U.S. TCs’ monoglossic orientations been challenged during their translingual collaborations with TCs from Türkiye? (2) How do the U.S. TCs interpret and define translanguaging through their experience in this telecollaborative contact zone? In the absence of clear modeling or detailed theoretical exegesis of translanguaging as pedagogy and social-justice orientation, the U.S. TCs vary in their explications of translanguaging, describing the phenomenon as the existence of multiple languages in one discourse or the use, or non-use, of translation to aid understanding. In video-recorded interactions with TCs from Türkiye, the U.S. TCs engage in a ‘contact zone’ of translingualism. They participate in and negotiate their way through language mixing and translation, interculturality, diverse linguistic and literacy practices, and misunderstandings. There is little evidence, however, of U.S. TCs adopting a translanguaging stance: for instance, there are no ‘breakthrough’ or ‘aha’ moments in the U.S. cohort that helped them connect the multilingual negotiations with Turkish students with what they might one day face in their language classrooms. But walls between monoglossic ideations and real-world languaging were fractured, helping U.S. TCs to access gesture, and become parties to bilingualism, collaboration, mediation, and vernacular expression.