Translanguaging as a social justice strategy: the case of teaching Chinese to ethnic minority students in Hong Kong

Abstract

For the past two decades, a significant number of ethnic minority students from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds have entered Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong for the first time. Simultaneously, Chinese language teachers have come under criticism for their lack of understanding of diversity and their failure to integrate ethnic minority students academically and socially. However, there is little research on how these teachers can transform their educational beliefs, teaching techniques, and attitudes toward diversity and inclusion to respond effectively to the drastic changes taking place in their professional work. This study examines how a group of Chinese language teachers employed translanguaging as a social justice strategy to address the challenges of teaching minority students in a monolingual and assimilative educational setting in Hong Kong. Classroom observations show that teachers enacted a translanguaging stance, using students’ familiar semiotic resources to make their teaching more inclusive and equitable for ethnic minority students from low socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. Teachers reported becoming more aware of diversity in the classroom as well as of the social inequalities and racial discrimination outside of school. The study shows that criticism has been unfairly levied on Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong, who should not be held responsible for the social problems hindering ethnic minorities’ social mobility. Research should include a decolonial perspective to legitimize translanguaging as a social justice strategy for more transformative praxis in the education sector in postcolonial Hong Kong.

Pedagogical Translanguaging as a Socially Just Strategy for Multilingual Students in Occupational Therapy

“…In summary, translanguaging offers cognitive, affective, and linguistic affordances [55], as was also established in this study. In addition, as widely acknowledged, translanguaging supports learning (see, for example, Garcia and Kleifgen [34]; Rosiers, [56]; Rajendram [55]), identity development [57] and is empowering [13,33]. However, due to institutional and societal constraints [55,56] the use of translanguaging remains limited.…”

“…Translanguaging refers to "the deployment of a speaker's full linguistic repertoire without regard for adherence to socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages" [31] (p. 283). Translanguaging is what multilingual speakers do daily to make sense of their world [28,32], what Wang [33] refers to as a linguistic reality. Garcia and Kleifgen [34] provide a detailed account of the evolution of translanguaging as a sociolinguistic theory, its conceptualisations, and its origins in educational practice, giving attention to the performances of multilinguals and relation to literacies.…”

Translanguaging Practices and Recontextualizing Learning Material: A Corpus-Based Study of Global Chinese Language Textbooks Used in Sri Lanka

“…Since translanguaging perceives the learners' and teachers' language repertoire in its entirety as a rich resource for enhancing language competence, it allows a wide range of spaces to interplay and interact within the classroom including the sociocultural and literary resources of the learners. As claimed by Charalambous et al (2020), Veliz (2021), and Wang (2022), translanguaging could also be perceived from a social justice perspective as it has the potential for promoting inclusiveness and harmonious existence between learners of diverse sociocultural and linguistic settings.…”