Translanguaging pedagogy in teaching English: A case study of a middle-school classroom in China

Translanguaging has become a buzzword in the past decade. The concept of translanguaging has been interpreted from various perspectives, i.e., psycholinguistic (Li, 2018), sociolinguistic (García & Otheguy, 2019) as well as pedagogic (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). The last perspective is this thesis’s focus. The thesis investigated the contexts where translanguaging was employed as pedagogy and analyzed its potential advantages in an English-learning classroom in China.

As an emerging pedagogy, research regarding translanguaging has been conducted in different multilingual countries and reported a positive reply from many researchers and scholars. However, few studies have been conducted in largely monolingual countries, such as China, where the concept of translanguaging is nascent. In comparison to multilingual societies, bilingual education in China follows a different path in which English is taught as a foreign language and serves as enrichment for students’ career development. Therefore, the effectiveness of this pedagogy, proven in a multilingual environment, is questioned when applied to largely monolingual English as a Foreign Language (EFL) countries, especially in middle and high schools, which are highly examoriented in China.

Drawing on the 12-hour data collected through observations in a middle school EFL classroom, this thesis employed qualitative content analysis methods
adopted from grounded theory and identified five contexts where translanguaging was used by the participating English teacher. Each context was elaborated with translanguaging examples of the teacher and students’ interactions, followed by discussions of the practices’ potential benefits, as well as the concerns of duplication, if any. In particular, two translanguaging practices designed by the teacher were explained and concluded in steps. The impact of pedagogical translanguaging was concluded by analyzing the teacher and students’ interactional patterns and students’ Mean Length of Utterance (MLU).

Given that there is a relative lack of attention given in the literature to Chinese teachers’ and students’ attitudes regarding translanguaging in EFL contexts, two semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teacher, providing an indepth understanding of the teacher’s beliefs on translanguaging and its effectiveness in teaching. Furthermore, questionnaires from all students in the participating teacher’s class and one-on-one interviews with five focal students were collected and utilized to document students’ stances on translanguaging and its impact. Findings from both sides demonstrated complexity regarding teacher’s language use and students’ language use.

This thesis is expected to contribute to the understanding of pedagogical translanguaging in an EFL context. More specifically, this thesis sheds light on the application of translanguaging to leverage the students’ entire linguistic repertoire for maximal learning in satisfying the needs of examinations and real life communication.