Undoing Linguistic Damage: Translanguaging as Pedagogical Healing in the Face of English-Linked Trauma

This paper uses critical autoethnography and student texts to explore translanguaging as a form of pedagogical healing in the context of English language dominance in Ecuadorian higher education. Drawing on four years of teaching a bilingualism course at a private university, it examines how English circulates as a proxy for intelligence, legitimacy, and mobility, reinforcing social hierarchies and internalized deficit narratives. Through reflective narrative, classroom vignettes, and student writing, the paper traces how translanguaging initially served to support participation but gradually evolved into a framework for emotional re-signification. The analysis shows that engaging translanguaging not only as a method but as theory opened space for students to revisit past experiences of linguistic exclusion and reframe silence, hesitation, and vulnerability as meaningful responses to structural conditions. The paper offers a situated account of how translanguaging can help name, interrupt, and begin to repair the quiet violences of linguistic imperialism in postcolonial classrooms.