Timespacing competence: multilingual children's linguistic worlds

Drawing on Kramsch's conceptualization of the multilingual subject and the symbolic self, in this paper, we explore how multilingual children re-signify three intertwined myths about the bilingual student, linguistic diversity and language competence, when, in the researcher-generated activity My linguistic world 2014, they are invited to map and talk about their lived experiences as multiple language users seen in the light of place and movement. By demythifying themselves and their linguistic worlds, the children also raise important questions about the notion of linguistic competence. By perceiving competences from a subjective child perspective, we learn how children do what we call timespacing competence. On that basis, we suggest paying attention to how children themselves timespace competence by focusing (more consistently) on the subjective, social, spatial and temporal dimensions of (knowing) language.