Abstract
AbstractIn English-medium instruction (EMI), English-as-a-second-language students will learn all/some subjects through English. Although there are a considerable number of studies which explore classroom interaction in Hong Kong (HK) secondary EMI schools, few studies have investigated EMI lessons which involve South Asian ethnic minorised students. These students share different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and they may not share a common first language with the teacher and other classmates. This study conducts a multimodal conversation analysis of science and mathematics lessons at a HK EMI secondary school, triangulated with interview data, in order to explore how the EMI teacher mobilises various resources to make discipline-specific knowledge accessible and cater for the different needs of all students in the classroom. This study argues that the process of enacting inclusive practices is a process of translanguaging which requires the EMI teacher to mobilise various available multilingual and semiotic resources and draw on what students know collectively for transcending cultural boundaries from the students’ everyday culture to cultures of school science and mathematics.
Highlights
Adopting English-as-a-second/foreign-language other than the home language as the mediumof-instruction in academic subjects, such as mathematics and science, is a growing phenomenon in many countries (Lo, 2014; Lo & Lin, 2018)
Contemporary scholarship has illustrated that translanguaging challenges the monolingual pedagogical principle adopted in traditional English-medium instruction (EMI) classrooms since it poses a serious challenge to equity (Lin & He, 2017)
This article has adopted translanguaging as an analytical perspective in order to reveal how the EMI science and mathematics teacher mobilises various multilingual and multimodal resources to promote meaning-making and knowledge construction, creates a culture of school science and mathematics for students to be inducted into the discursive and semiotic practices of the discipline, and promotes inclusion and participation in EMI classrooms for linguistically and culturally diverse students
Summary
Adopting English-as-a-second/foreign-language other than the home language as the mediumof-instruction in academic subjects, such as mathematics and science, is a growing phenomenon in many countries (Lo, 2014; Lo & Lin, 2018). Ainscow et al, 2006; Miles & Singal, 2010) Such diversity can be shown in any classrooms of learners and studies have illustrated the complex ways in which disabilities, gender, language barriers, ethnicity and social class can influence a student’s opportunity to succeed or fail in the educational system. Lin, 2006; Lin & Wu, 2015; Mazak & Herbas-Donoso, 2015; Wu & Lin, 2019) These studies typically focus on classroom settings where the students share a common first language (L1) and cultural background with the teacher and other classmates. Little attention has been paid to how EMI science and mathematics teachers conduct teaching in linguistically and culturally diverse EMI classrooms which may involve minority ethnic children of immigrant backgrounds
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