Exploring Translanguaging Practices In Chinese Postgraduate CLIL Classrooms And Students’ And Teachers’ Perceptions:A Case Study

When bi/multilingual research has become a boom,an increasing number of studies on translanguaging in bi/multilingual education have been carried out in recent years,some of which are within the CLIL(Content and Language Integrated Learning)context.However,most studies focus more on language than content,and involve less on other modalities in the classroom;secondly,few studies pay attention to translanguaging in postgraduate CLIL classroom and teachers’ and students’ perceptions.In order to explore translanguaging practices in postgraduate CLIL classrooms and students’ and teachers’ perceptions in China,mixed methods were employed in this case study.235 graduate students and 4 CLIL teachers were chosen as the research participants,and classroom observations(recordings),researcher’ s field notes,interviews with teachers,and after-class interviews with some students were used to obtain detailed data.After data coding and analysis,this study found that: 1)translanguaging practices in postgraduate CLIL classrooms not only exist at the language level but also the multimodal level(including embodied teaching);2)four teacher participants all recognize the positive role of L1 for understanding the subject content,but not all agree that L1 is conducive to target language learning;for multimodal teaching strategies,teachers only use them naturally and habitually,and do not realize their importance in designing students’ learning experience;students are aware of the scaffolding role of L1 for subject learning,but they are still not out of monolingual ideology,and they generally support the use of multimodal teaching in classrooms.3)translanguaging can help teachers express the subject content of the class more clearly and vividly,and improve students’ understanding of the knowledge.The author believes that these research findings can help students and teachers to be more aware of the benefits of fluent and flexible translanguaging practices for learning,and at the same time allow us to re-examine the role of the first language in the CLIL classroom and realize the advantages of multimodal translanguaging.In addition,the research can provide some inspiration for teachers to design pedagogical translanguaging at the language and multimodal level in the future.