A Study On The Translanguaging Practices In FFL Classrooms

Translanguaging,a new terminology mostly referred to in literature of bilingual education,multilingual education as well as second language learning,has been a thriving academic focus in recent years.From its origin in welsh,translanguaging has developed its initial connotation indicating the translation between two different languages to be more updated and more inclusive.A flood of scholars such as Li Wei and Ofelia García have made considerable contributions to the research of translanguaging and translanguaging has been enunciated as a theory in applied linguistics.Li Wei,one of the most well-known scholars devoted to the research of translanguaging,proposes that translanguaging indicates the practices which create a flexible and harmonious space where people transcend the named linguistic systems,the cognitive systems and other multimodal systems and to deploy their whole repertoires consisting of all the available resources to make meaning,to interact with others and to be in the world.Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory argues that it is through interpersonal interaction that knowledge is acquired and further internalized.And from translangugaing theory,a language classroom is a translangugaing space where teachers and students are able to resort to their full repertoires of different dimensions of resources including diverse languages,other multimodal codes such as gestures,pictures and movements to achieve effective communication,thus facilitating the acquisition of the target language.Based on the sociocultural theory and translanguaging theory,this thesis attempts to reveal the authentic translangugaing practices in two French as a foreign language(FFL)classrooms in a Top-10 university in China with an ethnographic approach including a questionnaire,semi-structure interviews as well as class observations.The study answers three research questions as follows: 1)What are the students’ attitudes towards translanguaging? 2)What are the teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging? 3)What are the functions of tranlanguaging practices and how are these functions realized in the classroom? The study reveals that almost all the students hold positive attitudes towards translanguaging.The teachers’ attitudes towards translanguaging are complex for that one of the two teachers support a translanguaging pedagogy while the other one insists on a French-only policy but agrees that the multimodal non-verbal resources can facilitate teaching and learning in the classroom.What’s more,three functions of translanguaging which are the interpretive function,the managerial function and the interpersonal function are illustrated in detail in this study.Finally,this thesis tries to provide some implications for some scholars,educational policy-makers,educators,and especially for teachers in second language classrooms and suggest them to renew their knowledge and opinions about translanguaging practices and not to overlook the indispensable role of translanguaging in classrooms.