Multilingualism in Education: why do multilingual teachers translanguage in the English learning classroom?
Description
In this research, I address the pedagogical functions of translanguaging in classrooms. There are four themes to categorise the functions, namely translanguaging for understanding the unknown field, translanguaging for interpersonal interaction, translanguaging for language instructions, and finally, translanguaging as discourse markers. The analysis found the following themes relating to why teachers translanguage, for understanding unknown knowledge, for interpersonal interaction, for language instruction and as discourse markers. The analysis of interview data reveals that teachers have limited awareness of the pedagogical contributions of translanguaging. Teachers hold a passive attitude towards using Putonghua in the classroom, but implicitly took advantage of translanguaging. The findings can be applied to develop teacher education in order to keep teachers' teaching theory updated. The result of the present research has confirmed the pedagogical value of translanguaging. The findings have important implications for developing teacher education to raise teachers' multilingual awareness. Secondly, the pedagogical functions of translanguaging should be introduced clearly to teachers. To be specific, while translanguaging to enhance comprehension, teachers are also supposed to give extra information, such as background knowledge or contextualisation. Teachers are also supposed to use translanguaging to create a communicative language learning classroom. Finally, teachers are encouraged to freely translanguage in language instruction and indicating discourse markers.
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In this research, I adopted classroom observation and post observation interviews as instruments. After classroom recordings generated verbal data, I followed the discourse analysis to analyse teachers' language. Additionally, I examined teachers' purposes for different discourses and teachers’ perceptions using data from individual interviews. The research data was transcribed verbatim from the classroom recordings and follow-up interviews, and the transcripts followed conventions set by Seedhouse (2004) for conversational analysis. For classroom observation, I adopted an analyst driven method to identify a range of themes, driven by theoretical interest (Braun & Clarke, 2006), with reference to different categories of functions summarised by Luk & Lin (2015) and Garcia & Li (2014). In addition, I identified possible themes for classroom recording data and interview data. Similarly, to analyse semi structured interview data, I first identified some themes in a deductive way based on the interview questions and allowed themes driven by data to emerge. After the refinement of themes, I selected appropriate examples under each theme for the analysis production.