Translanguaging in a Chinese university CLIL classroom: Teacher strategies and student attitudes

Abstract

Pedagogical translanguaging has been extensively researched over the past decade. Yet, little is known about the attitudes of students towards this practice. Students constitute an integral part of classroom interactions and their learning process is significantly affected by teachers’ classroom discourse. This action research (AR) study, situated in a Chinese university Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) reading classroom and aided by lesson recordings and two sets of questionnaires, explores the translanguaging strategies employed by the teacher as well as the students’ attitudes to such strategies. Through incorporating feedback collected from students regarding the teacher’s modifications of language use, the study has demonstrated how the teacher mobilizes her full linguistic resources, in the form of translanguaging, to achieve pedagogical outcomes, which eventually leads to the establishment of a mutually beneficial classroom ecology. The study also indicates that advanced EFL learners, highly motivated to improve language proficiency and acquire subject content unanimously reject the traditional monolingual approach to teaching. The findings call for further research into the impact of pedagogical translanguaging on students’ learning process in multilingual classrooms.

Towards a Sustainable Classroom Ecology: Translanguaging in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in a Finance Course at an International School in Shanghai

“…Nevertheless, Mazak and Herbas-Donoso [14]'s viewpoint of translanguaging being prompted by contextual resources is echoed in this study. In terms of students' attitudes to classroom translanguaging, results from the present study are in line with some of the existing literature [5,34] but contradict with Wang [33]'s findings, where more than half of the participants opted for a monolingual approach of teaching.…”

“…Categories and terms emerging from the data set, and recurring codes found during the data collection process, were further verified with the participants. Once the data collection was complete, connections between the various types of translanguaging practices were explored, studied meticulously and compared to those from previous research [14,31,34,47,48]. The analysis also adopted a cross-case analysis [51]; when the salient categories were recognized, they were compared to the data collected across other participants until they were fully revised and confirmed.…”

“…Secondly, most previous research exploring translanguaging practices in bilingual science classrooms has focused on the teacher as the main translanguager. Through analyses of classroom discourse among teachers, different translanguaging strategies emerged [31,34,47] and specific pedagogical purposes such as bridging outside knowledge and colearning were highlighted [14,49]. Even the limited number of studies that did prioritize student contributions in classroom interactions showed more interest in categorizing students' translanguaging practices according to classroom activities [41,58].…”

“…Empirical evidence has revealed that translanguaging can be employed as a deliberate strategy to achieve a number of pedagogical outcomes, including explaining subject content, eliciting students' oral output, managing classroom discipline, and building teacher-student rapport [31][32][33][34]. Translanguaging has been used to describe not only multilingual oral interaction but also the inclusion of different languages in written texts [6,35].…”

A Review of Studies on EFL Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions of Tranglanguaging as a Pedagogical Approach

“…Together, these two types of translanguaging can facilitate learners' understanding of complex academic content as well as enhance the target language learning. Empirical evidence has proved that translanguaging can be used as a deliberate strategy to achieve a variety of pedagogical goals, including explaining subject content, eliciting students' oral output, managing classroom discipline, and building teacher-student rapport (García & Wei, 2014;Zhou & Mann, 2021).…”