Abstract
In 2018, Taiwan announced a bilingual education policy. Since then, bilingual teacher development has been a national priority, which has created anxiety and concerns among local Taiwanese teachers, who are expected to teach in the English medium. By extending the core values, design principles and inspired practices from New London Group’s (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies (PoM), we present how a local Taiwanese teacher in a Grade 1 content and language integrated learning mathematics class successfully leveraged translingual and trans-semiotic resources in an English-as-a-foreign-language context, which in turn facilitated learners’ multilingual production. The findings show that trans-semiotizing helps bilingual teachers effectively deliver and support content learning, whereas translanguaging enables bilingual teachers to create a positive environment which encourages learners’ multilingual production. This study provides an opportunity for Taiwan’s educators to productively navigate problems arising from the bilingual education policy and nativespeakerism in Taiwan through creatively adapting the PoM. This study concludes with directions for bilingual teacher education.
Highlights
Empowering local bilingual teachers in Taiwan the hope of policy makers that Taiwan’s English learners gain more experience using English to learn and to communicate, but develop global competence, learning to “appreciate and respect different peoples and cultures and be ready to engage in international affairs with confidence and insight” (MOE, 2018, n.p.)
We propose that recent theories inspired by pedagogy of multiliteracies (PoM) could enhance CLIL implementation in Taiwan (Coyle, 2018; Lotherington, 2012)
This study adopts the mini-ethnographic case-study design, a blended design that is bound in time and space and uses qualitative ethnographic and case study collection methods (Fusch & Ness, 2017). This approach is suitable for this study because it focuses on a specific moment when Taiwan shifts towards bilingual education with CLIL implementation
Summary
It is well established that a primary aim of the 21st century classroom is to equip students with the competence to engage globally and participate in today’s interconnected, complex and linguistically diverse societies. The diagram presents a model where linguistic resources (e.g., L1, L2, everyday and academic, oral and written language varieties and registers) and multiple modes of support such as visual and other multimodal and semiotic resources are strategically employed by teachers to facilitate learning Such bridging materials allow emergent bilingual learners to access content knowledge in CLIL classes. Translanguaging as a pedagogy and theoretical lens (Lin, 2020) has opened an opportunity for local contexts to critically respond to the hegemony of native-speakerism in language education These theoretical lenses guide us to design and implement a particular bilingual initiative in Taiwan elementary classroom where English is not traditionally used as the medium of instruction. We hope to identify important training topics to help Taiwan’s teachers become proficient bilingual teachers
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