Translanguaging and identity construction as a resource for learning in a CLIL subject classroom in China

This presentation reports a 14-week pedagogical intervention and qualitative case study which utilised ‘translanguaging pedagogy’ and ‘emergent bilinguals’ as the guiding principles. The project explored how Chinese university students in a CLIL Linguistics course can be stimulated to mobilize their bilingual identity repertoires to engage in critical learning. The course design will be shown. Aligning with the social constructivist view of learning, this study perceives learning as identity-indicative ways of knowing and meaning-making in a situated context. Therefore, to examine how bilingual identities are enacted in these Chinese students’ meaning-making processes, I collected the following three forms of student discourse. Firstly, audio-recordings of student discussion in the classroom throughout the intervention were collected. Secondly, individual student audio-recordings of one’s verbal reflection and thinking-aloud made during the coursework were collected. Regarding the above two sources of data, I adopted a translanguaging framework and examined the situations and processes through which the students traversed across linguistic, discoursal, societal or cultural boundaries to enhance learning. Thirdly, an English story-writing task was assigned to the students respectively before and after the intervention to examine how the students’ bilingual identities may have transformed. In both times, students were asked to imagine a series of movie-like scenes showing the ‘I’ in 10 years. Critical discourse analysis was subsequently conducted on the collected stories to capture nuanced changes in the construction of one’s imagined future selves. The findings are mainly twofold. Firstly, this intervention cultivated bilingual identities and reduced English native speakerism. Secondly, through performing identities such as ‘insiders of China’ or ‘story tellers’, the students connected their L2-mediated disciplinary knowledge with their L1-mediated lifeworld and positioned themselves as legitimate knowledge-makers. The results shed light on the cultivation of a motivating and inclusive L2 university classroom in China that leverages emergent bilinguals’ identity repertoires as their unique strength.