Abstract
Pedagogical translanguaging has emerged as an important strategy facilitating the sustainable use of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in educational settings. This mixed-method study, conducted in an EMI finance classroom at an international school in Shanghai, China, investigates the translanguaging practices of students in classroom interactions as well as their attitudes toward translanguaging as a communicative and pedagogical strategy. Drawing on video-assisted classroom observations and semistructured interviews, this study reveals that the participants’ translanguaging practices are motivated by ease of communication, facilitated by contextual resources, and reflect their strategic maneuvering of the linguistic resources in their repertoires. The data also suggest that the participants are generally positive about translanguaging as an aid in comprehension and for the enhancement of content learning. Some participants, however, expressed reservations about the acceptance of translanguaging as a standard, formal linguistic choice. The findings suggest that EMI teachers should recognize the linguistic resources of students in their entirety and incorporate them into classroom activities to promote biliteracy and the learning of academic content.
Highlights
The use of English as a Medium of Instruction ( EMI) has seen a rapid increase in scale across the globe [1]
Since the classroom discourse in the present study involved the intermixing of Putonghua and English, translanguaging practices tended to differ among participants depending on their first languages (L1s)
When students spoke Putonghua as their L1, their translanguaging practices showed the dominant presence of Putonghua for their primary sentence structure, with English words interspersed; this pattern was reversed for students whose L1 was not Putonghua
Summary
The use of English as a Medium of Instruction ( EMI) has seen a rapid increase in scale across the globe [1]. Recent years have witnessed a rise in the number of EMI studies conducted in higher education institutions across various academic disciplines [2], indicating that English is taught as a skill-based subject and serves as an instructional language to assist in teaching other disciplines [3]. The situation is very different in international schools, where English functions as the main instructional language for a wide range content, including science, mathematics, history and literature, among others [5]. English is designated as the sole language for use on campus and in the classroom, it is not the only language used in EMI classrooms at international schools.
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