When I try to pin down what counts as bilingual now, I no longer picture two neatly stacked boxes labeled "Korean" and "English". I see a repertoire in motion. Growing up between Korean-speaking environments and English-speaking environments, I didn't pause ot translate between systems. I just used whatever worked to make meaning. Dr Mena's video, drawing on Otheguy, García, and Reid, helped me name that experience. From an outsider's view, code-switching assumes the boxes are rigid and measures how well we toggle between them. From an insider's perspective, translanguaging reflects how we actually think and communicate, drawing from a holistically integrated linguistic repertoire.
This insider perspective reframes what bilingualism even is, and by extension, how schools evaluate it. García et al., in Chapter 4, review decades of empirical work on bilingualism and achievement that disrupts the still-popular 'bilingualism as a handicap' myth. Early IQ and language-testing studies built on monolingual norms misrepresented bilingual students as cognitively delayed. However, more recent meta-analyses and longitudinal studies consistently show that students in well-implemented bilingual programs perform as well as or better than their monolingual peers in academic outcomes. The catch, however, is that these benefits depend less on the number of languages used and more on how fully students' repertoires are legitimized. In additive and dual-language models that honor both languages as resources, students will thrive; in substractive/assimilationist settings, achievement gaps persist. Empirical evidence, in other words, follows ideology.
This linkage between ideology and schooling feels clearer when monoglossic schooling is contrasted with heteroglossic approaches that center on translanguaging as the norm. The 'English-only' reading block or the 'heritage-language' class isn't just a structural separation. Instead, it's a worldview that privileges certain languages, standardized literacies, and middle-class white norms of communication. Translanguaging pedagogy intervenes at that ideological level. The three components, which García outlines as stance, design, and shift, are commitments to understanding students' way of meaning-making in different languages. When teachers adopt this stance, classroom practices evolve into intellectual collaboration of different perspectives and metalinguistic awareness. Translanguaging is no longer a sign of confusion for the student.
The Vocal Fries podcast highlighted the racial politics of this. Flores and Rosa reminded listeners that terms like semilingualism or even the 'bilingual advantage' framework can reproduce deficit logic when advantage is coded white and deficiency is built upon racialized ideologies. The ethnographic work on a bilingual family with an autistic child adds another layer to this idea of expanding the linguistic repertoire. Yu distinguishes between bilingualism as conceptualized—the way professionals, therapists, and schools define what counts as 'appropriate' language use— and bilingualism as lived—the messier, multimodal, and deeply relational practices that actually happen in families. In the study, well-meaning clinicians urged the parents to raise their child in English only, assuming that bilingual exposure would 'confuse' him. But the child was able to communicate fluidly across Cantonese and English. Yu's point echoes García's: institutions often legitimize language use from the outside, when meaning-making happens from the inside. The family's translanguaging helped the child make sense of the world in different ways.
So when I think of bilingualism now, I think less about mastery of two languages and more about the conditions that support different types of communication. Classrooms can either cut off half of a child's linguistic identity or amplify it. In my future classroom, I want to let students draft in the language that carries their idea, discuss across languages, then celebrate different perspectives that come with the languages.