Centering Translanguaging for Inclusive Health Communication: Implications for Healthcare Professional Education

This chapter introduces and discusses translanguaging as a practical theory of language in relation to medical language education and multilingual healthcare encounters in intercultural spaces. We center translanguaging as a means to privilege the meaning- and sense-making practices of multilingual community members, and in doing so, to challenge the ideological bedrock underpinning educational and professional choices and practices that broaden the linguistic and cultural divide between healthcare professionals and linguistically/culturally diverse patients. Our proposal largely bears on the linguistic and cultural expertise of so-called heritage speakers as multicompetent language users, and their potential to reshape our understanding and approaches to multilingual healthcare encounters.