Developing Translanguaging as a Pedagogical Approach to Teaching English for Academic Purposes: A Teacher-Researcher Collaborative Endeavour

Abstract

In recent years, translanguaging has been proposed as a pedagogical approach to facilitating development of academic literacy in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). This could be challenging for teachers given that mainstream EAP usually encourages academic socialization into the dominant academic genres in English discourse, which inevitably marginalizes other languages. Thus, there is a lack of research on how pedagogical translanguaging is carried out in practice. Drawing on a combination of two theoretical conceptualizations: the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016) and strategies of translanguaging as pedagogy (Garcia & Li, 2014), this paper reports on a design based research study in which an intervention of systematic planning and use of translanguaging was implemented in an EAP course at a university in China. Findings from classroom observation, co-planning meetings, after class debriefings and final interview with the teacher have shown both the teacher’s development of using translanguaging as pedagogy and some challenges she encountered during this collaborative research journey. This suggests that implementing pedagogical translanguaging can be both ideologically and pragmatically challenging for EAP teachers. The paper calls for discussions with teachers on principles that value multilingual speakers’ linguistic repertoire in teaching and learning EAP and investigations of how these principles can be realized through teacher-researcher collaboration in co-developing pedagogical translanguaging approaches. References: García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave. Lin, A. M. (2016). Language Across the Curriculum & CLIL in English as an Additional Language (EAL) Contexts: Theory and Practice. Springer.