Resumen de Navigating between a Monolingual Utopia and Translingual Realities: Experiences of American Learners of Yorùbá as an Additional Language

Junko Mori, Kazeem Kéhìndé Sanuth

• Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers’ fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in Anglophone nations, its implications to foreign language education in higher education have not been fully explored. The current article addresses this issue by shedding light on the conditions of teaching and learning of indigenous languages spoken in once-colonized regions of the world as an additional language for English speakers. More specifically, it examines how American students who participated in an eight-week Yorùbá study abroad program in Nigeria navigated a rather conspicuous gap between a monolingual utopia promoted by the program and the complex translingual realities of everyday language use outside of the classroom. Through the review of the perspectives of students with diverse backgrounds, the article discusses the significance of taking sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts surrounding the target language into account to cultivate informed learners.