Exploring Online Chinese-English Bilingual Content and Language Integrated Learning Classrooms Through Moment Analysis

Abstract

Bilingual education studies consider the fluid and dynamic linguistic repetoire of teachers and students as helpful resources accomplishing communicative goals in real-life context. This study examines the translanguaging practices of Chinese-English bilingual Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in an online environment. Data was collected through partiticpant classroom observation and interviews. Moment analysis is employed to analyze the creativity and costs of translanguaging moments of the stakeholders. The classroom observation demonstrated translanguaging, as a co-constructed communicative tool, was initiated both by the teacher and students as translanguaging agents. Specifically, peer interaction and question answering were two main contexts in which students initiated translanguaging. And the teacher initiated translanguging in three contexts, namely, acamedic content knowledge teaching, classroom feedback and classroom management. Results from interviews with the teacher and students revealed that English proficiency might be the primary factor spurring translanguaging practices. Weaker English proficiency would lead to more active translanguaging praxis. Besides, translanguaging forms might be mediated by socio- and cultural-linguistic factors. English is used to express compliment and approval while Chinese will be employed to offer constructive criticism. Lastly, the costs of translanguaging moments were furthure analyzed. It is concluded that students translanguaging in the context of peer discussion lowered their cost of communication. Through code-mixing students confidence in solving academic problems is boosted and their engagement in group project is promoted as well. Teachers translanguaging lowered teachers teaching cost and students learning cost whereby the teacher-student confidence was co-constructed in this specific context. Whilst translanguaging pedagogy is endorsed in terms of content knowledge teaching and learning, it remains unclear whether the English proficiency is facilitated. Current research indicates it is important to be critical of translanguaging costs in integrating content and language learning.