Students’ Perceptions of Using Translanguaging to Understand Business Concepts

Abstract

Translanguaging, increasingly attracting scholars’ attention in recent decades, has been highlighted as a pedagogical practice by most existing studies in promoting students’ understanding of materials with their linguistic resources in different education contexts. However, studies related to translanguaging in Chinese EMI classrooms are scarce, and so are students’ perceptions of translanguaging in such a context. This study, following a mixed-method with a questionnaire and semi-structured interview, aims to investigate how students perceive the use of translanguaging to understand business concepts in their EMI classrooms. 60 third-year business English students from a university in China participated in this study. The results showed that business English students generally held a supportive perception of using translanguaging and that they agreed with the appropriateness and naturalness of using it in their classrooms to scaffold their learning of business concepts. The qualitative findings reported that translanguaging could help them understand and remember the meanings of those concepts easier without rote learning, assist classmates with lower English proficiency to express their ideas as well as relieve their emotional pressures. The findings lend further support for the use of L1 so as to mobilize students’ language resources in learning content in the future.