Multilingual Resources Research Articles

Multilingual Practices and Trans-Language Methods in Teaching English

The study investigates trans-language methods in teaching English. The research examines multilingual practices in the Ukrainian context from sociocultural and multimodal perspectives. Also, it is a desire to know how trans-language techniques can effectively enhance language acquisition. The data came from the Program of English Language Profile conducted in two Ukrainian Universities, aimed at giving students in the bachelor’s programs the opportunity to reinforce their multilingual and intercultural competencies in a second foreign language (English) within the first semester of 2021. The study analyzes the audio recording of students’ and teachers’ multilingual practices, questionnaires on students’ attitudes toward trans-language, and qualitative interviews with teachers. Results show how multilingual resources may facilitate intercultural communication and language development. The findings emphasize the importance of building natural multilingualism and making it a resource, strategy, and goal of teaching English. This study provides practical suggestions and techniques on how universities can adapt to formal teaching environments. Implementations show that trans-language processes become a set of multilingual practices whereby language teachers build on and use their students’ linguistic resources and background knowledge to convey meaningful content. This research develops ‘trans-language’ as an educational and linguistic concept and gives educators the ground to think critically about the advantages and limitations of adopting a multilingual approach.

Translanguaging in scientific practices: a study of high school teachers in English Medium Instruction inquiry-based science classrooms

ABSTRACT English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is being used to teach academic subjects in international programmes in China to meet the growing number of Chinese students’ need to study abroad. Through the lens of inquiry-based science teaching, this study examined how the four EMI science teachers of an international programme at a private high school employed translanguaging in scientific practices such as identifying variables and formulating hypotheses. Based on the data collected from a case study, the analyses demonstrate how these science teachers used multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate students’ engagement in scientific inquiry activities and to promote the construction of scientific knowledge. A total of seven types of translanguaging practices were identified, including opening the inquiry, negotiating directions, teacher encouragement, managing discipline, fun learning environment, definitions, and explanations. The findings imply that pedagogical translanguaging can create a space for the construction of scientific knowledge, as well as a space for the implementation of scientific practices in an inquiry-based EMI classroom environment.

Embodied enactment of a hypothetical scenario in an English medium instruction secondary mathematics classroom: A translanguaging approach

Adopting a language other than the first as the medium of instruction in teaching mathematics can create significant problems for students’ mathematical learning. However, there is little research on the ways in which bi/multilingual mathematics teachers can make use of diverse multilingual and multimodal resources to keep students engaged in learning abstract mathematical knowledge. This article aims to explore how an English-medium-instruction (EMI) mathematics teacher creates different hypothetical scenarios through embodied enactments to enhance students’ mathematical understanding and motivate students’ interest in learning mathematics. The data of this study is obtained from a focused classroom observation in a Hong Kong EMI secondary mathematics classroom. Multimodal conversation analysis is employed to analyse the classroom interaction data, and the analysis is triangulated with video-stimulated-recall interviews which are analysed with interpretative phenomenological analysis. This article aims to extend the notion of embodied enactment as a form of translanguaging to facilitate mathematical learning and develop students’ motivation in learning mathematics in the EMI setting. Particularly, this article argues that embodied enactment creates a translanguaging space for the EMI teacher to achieve mathematical teaching.

The Four Roles of L1 in CLIL and Translanguaging: Negotiator, Mediator, Encourager, Facilitator

The current landscape of English language teaching are moving from the monolingual assumption to the understanding that L1 is part of one person’s whole linguistic repertoire. However, this shift is still largely occurring in research while the practice of English teaching still largely considers L1 to be an unwanted interference. The potential role of L1 in making the input comprehensible should receive further consideration. This essay will discuss how language teachers should seek to leverage students’ L1-encoded prior knowledge rather than viewing it as an impediment within the context of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and translanguaging because they both explicitly affirm the goal of multilingual competence and involve the use of L1 in teaching practices. The difference lies in terms of the attitudes; the use of L1 is not contemplated as a priori in CLIL yet encouraged in translanguaging. This essay highlights the need for balanced and flexible L1 use in their respective contexts and pedagogies in respect to its roles: (1) L1 can negotiate meaning for L2 learning objects, (2) L1 can address the negative transfer of false cognates, (3) L1 can encourage the engagement of multilingual resources, and (4) L1 can facilitate classroom engagement.

Observing a teacher’s interactional competence in an ESOL classroom: a translanguaging perspective

Abstract Research on translanguaging practices in multilingual contexts has explored how translanguaging highlights the multilingual and multicultural nature of social interactions and its transformative nature in transgressing established norms and boundaries. This article aims to provide an alternative view of interactional competence by connecting it to the notion of translanguaging and its emphasis on the active deployment of multiple linguistic, semiotic, and sociocultural resources in a dynamic and integrated way. We argue for extending the notion of interactional competence as we suggest that translanguaging is the practice of drawing on a speaker’s interactional competence for constructing new configurations of language practices for communicative purposes. Such a conceptualization reinforces the meaning-making process as a locally emergent phenomenon and a jointly accomplished social action. It also conceptualizes the undertaking of co-constructing social interactions as a process of translanguaging whereby interactants need to seek out available multilingual and multimodal resources and make strategic choices among these resources in order to achieve their social actions on a moment-by-moment basis. This article utilizes Sequential-Categorial Analysis, which combines Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, in its analysis of classroom video recordings of vocabulary instruction in a beginner-level adult English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages classroom in order to demonstrate our argument.

QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension

Alongside huge volumes of research on deep learning models in NLP in the recent years, there has been much work on benchmark datasets needed to track modeling progress. Question answering and reading comprehension have been particularly prolific in this regard, with more than 80 new datasets appearing in the past 2 years. This study is the largest survey of the field to date. We provide an overview of the various formats and domains of the current resources, highlighting the current lacunae for future work. We further discuss the current classifications of “skills” that question answering/reading comprehension systems are supposed to acquire and propose a new taxonomy. The supplementary materials survey the current multilingual resources and monolingual resources for languages other than English, and we discuss the implications of overfocusing on English. The study is aimed at both practitioners looking for pointers to the wealth of existing data and at researchers working on new resources.

Constructing ‘corrupted village wives and urban men’ through multilingual performances

AbstractThis article analyzes the sociolinguistic construction of two gendered figures in multilingual performances, namely a category of young Mongol wives in rural societies who challenge patriarchal social order, and a group of young urban Mongol men whose dream is to be rich and indulge themselves in luxury. By drawing on the analytical framework of stance and stylization, the study analyzes how the performers’ multivalent stance-taking towards constructed personas and specific social-moral orders are communicated through their skillful stylization of multilingual resources in Inner Mongolia. It also points out that language stylization and stance-taking, taking place in reference to local cultural values and linguistic ideologies, are anchored in continually evolving ethnic, gender, and class relationships in a changing, minoritized Mongolian society in the context of Chinese modernization and capitalist marketization. (Stance-taking, language stylization, gendered discourses, Mongols, multilingualism)*

Lecturers’ use of examples in online university English-medium instruction: a micro-analytic classroom interaction and knowledge-building perspective

The increasing impact of internationalisation in higher education worldwide has led to the growing use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Much research on this phenomenon has focused on stakeholders’ viewpoints, but there is increasing interest in investigating interaction in EMI classrooms. One interactional practice which is relatively unexplored is that of EMI lecturers’ use of examples when co-constructing knowledge with students. This study explores how EMI lecturers provide examples to introduce and develop disciplinary content in their field. Using an interdisciplinary approach which combines Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) and the Autonomy dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), we analyse three exemplification sequences taken from a corpus of 46 hours of video-recordings of online teaching in three different disciplines (chemistry, business administration, food engineering) at a state EMI university in Turkey. The CA findings of the study show how the lecturers use a range of interactional and multilingual resources in the exemplification sequences to position students as more or less knowledgeable in relation to globally and locally relevant examples. The LCT Autonomy analyses trace the trajectories through which target and non-target knowledge moves as part of lecturers’ knowledge-building practices. The interdisciplinary findings of the study have implications for lecturer training and professional development in English medium universities.

Transnational postgraduate students’ experience of voice and participation

Abstract The article examines transnational students’ experiences of participation in European higher education by applying the notion of voice that encompasses the capacity to communicate and to be heard (Hymes 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis). Relating voice to access and participation, the article moves forward debates around incorporating students’ multilingual knowledge resources in diverse writing practices in academia. It takes into account structural and ideological conditions as well as the creative potential of translanguaging in students’ knowledge production. The instrumental case study explores the lived experiences of three multilingual students with highly diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds, who are enrolled in humanities master’s programmes at a Swedish university. It investigates the students’ perceptions of how they can make use of their linguistic and educational repertoires. The data derive from interviews around texts and audio-recorded writing diaries. The results demonstrate how translanguaging is mainly connected to writing for personal use and limited or regulated in assignment writing. They reveal multiple and contrasting ideological views on language use and knowledge, and highlight possibilities and obstacles for appropriating and recontextualising knowledge across languages, educational contexts and disciplines. The article thus connects translanguaging to questions of participation and access more broadly.

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Digital Libraries

Multilingualism and multiculturalism have become major preoccupations for Library and Information Science (LIS) which has to be as fair as possible to ensure and sustain knowledge diversity as a driver for development. This paper offers a broad overview of multilingualism and multiculturalism embedding into Digital Libraries (DL). We survey studies written in English over the past two decades (from 2002 to 2022) and indexed in one or more of the following databases: Science Direct, Google Scholars, Taylor and Francis, and Emerald Insight. We summarized studies to offer insights and outline opportunities in this area and classify them into five research themes: (i) studies describing Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) in Digital Libraires, (ii) studies describing building, enriching and using multilingual resources in digital libraries (iii) studies focusing on multilingual digital libraries initiatives, (iv) studies on collaboration, minority languages and ethics issues in digital libraries, and (v) studies on multilingual user needs. This survey aims to identify, collect and categorize the research literature on multilingualism and multiculturalism efforts in Digital Libraries.

Improving the lives of ethnically diverse family carers and people living with dementia using digital media resources - Protocol for the Draw-Care randomised controlled trial.

Ethnically diverse family carers of people living with dementia (hereafter carers and people with dementia) experience more psychological distress than other carers. To reduce this inequality, culturally adapted, multilingual, evidence-based practical assistance is needed. This paper details the Draw-Care study protocol including a randomised control trial (RCT) to test the effectiveness of a digital intervention comprising a multilingual website, virtual assistant, animated films, and information, on the lives of carers and people with dementia in Australia. The Draw-Care intervention will be evaluated in a 12-week active waitlist parallel design RCT with 194 carers from Arabic, Cantonese, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, Tamil, and Vietnamese-speaking language groups. Our intervention was based on the World Health Organization's (WHO) iSupport Lite online carer support messages and was co-designed with carers, people with dementia, service providers, and clinicians. Culturally adapted multilingual digital resources were created in nine languages and English. In Phase I (2022), six co-design workshops with stakeholders and interviews with people with dementia informed the development of the intervention which will be trialled and evaluated in Phases II and III (2023 and 2024). Digital media content is a novel approach to providing cost-effective access to health care information. This study protocol details the three study phases including the RCT of a co-designed, culturally adapted, multilingual, digital intervention for carers and people with dementia to advance the evidence in dementia and digital healthcare research and help meet the needs of carers and people with dementia in Australia and globally.

Представление знаний в многоязычных образовательных ресурсах

Introduction. Ontologies are now recognised as the advanced standard of knowledge representation for e-learning and some industries. In particular, the development of multilingual ontological education resources is characterised as a promising area of research in the context of industry universities’ digital transformation. The article deals with the development of an academic course multilingual ontology in a Controlled Natural Language. Relevance. Although there are many ontology editors, national developers of education resources should be familiar with formal logic and have a good command of English. Therefore, it is difficult to discuss widespread use of ontology-based education solutions in Russian universities. Materials and Methods. The article offers a version of Controlled Russian Language for academic knowledge representation. A methodology to be used for compiling academic course ontologies is developed. As an example, a piece of ontology for the Introductory Course on Railways is considered. Results and Discussion. To support this way of knowledge representation, a prototype of ontology editor Onto.plus was developed to support the version of Controlled Russian Language. To implement the multilanguage function, equivalent versions for the Controlled Russian Language ontology were developed in English and Chinese. Conclusions. The solutions are a contribution to the implementation of an open project to develop an ontology resource integrating universities and industry.

Features of Online Second Language Interactional Competence in a German-Israeli Virtual Exchange

Virtual Exchange (VE) is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in joint projects. Lingua Franca VEs combine numerous advantages, such as the acquisition of digital and intercultural skills, and further create an environment in which the foreign language is used in an authentic and immersive setting. Although VE is a highly communicative method, Second Language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) has barely been subjected to scientific scrutiny in this context yet.
 By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings, this cross-sectional study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-in-interaction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of GAT2 transcriptions of recorded ZOOM video conferences. These online meetings between EFL undergraduate students in secondary school teacher training are part of the VE project Extended Telecollaboration Practice (Waldman, Harel & Schwab, 2019) between Israel and Germany which was initiated in 2015 and is still on-going.
 This paper depicts the online-specific strategies that EFL-students adopt in order to gain common ground. Further, it will argue that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context.

Managing classroom misbehaviours in the Hong Kong English Medium Instruction secondary classrooms: A translanguaging perspective

Studies in English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classroom interaction have explored how content teachers can utilise various resources to encourage student engagement and facilitate the teaching and learning processes. However, less attention has been paid in terms of how teachers manage unexpected student behaviours that transgress the classroom order and disrupt the flow of classroom interaction. This article explores how EMI teachers contingently mobilise various multilingual and multimodal resources and sociocultural knowledge to address the moments when students produce socially unacceptable and inappropriate behaviour in regard to the normative expectancies in the classrooms. The data of this study is obtained from a larger linguistic ethnographic project in Hong Kong EMI secondary classrooms. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is employed to analyse the classroom interaction data and the analysis is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews which are analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. I argue that the EMI teachers construct a translanguaging space which affords them to draw on multiple resources to address student misbehaviours that transgresses norms for classroom participation. Such a safe space allows teachers to resume the forward progression of classroom activity and ease the tension between the teachers' authority and students’ participation in the classroom.

COVID-19 Vaccine Equity: Codesigning Public Health Interventions with Community Partners.

COVID-19 Vaccine Equity: Codesigning Public Health Interventions with Community Partners.

The multilingual children’s library as physical and metaphorical ‘space’ within the community: Practical and emotional considerations

Following the establishment of a multilingual children’s library section in Sheffield, England, this paper explores logistical and emotional considerations concerning the set-up and running of the library, and its role within the community. Adopting a case study approach, data are derived from book stock and borrowing statistics, feedback from multiple events (including multilingual storytelling and story writing events, and a reading scheme), as well as a library staff and a parent focus group. Data were analysed thematically according to logistical and emotional concerns, with subthemes – such as borrowing patterns, identity, belonging and physical and metaphorical ‘space’ being identified within the data. The research highlights shortcomings in cataloguing facilities, and in the way in which ‘successes’ are measured in library management and research, while adding significantly to our understanding of the contribution multilingual resources and events in public libraries makes to a community’s sense of identity and belonging. The notion of real and metaphorical ‘space’ for multilingualism as part of library provision forms a vital addition to the way libraries might consider their roles in diverse societies.

A multimodal analysis of the online translanguaging practices of international students studying Chinese in a Chinese university

Abstract Previous research has recognised the value of translanguaging in Chinese language teaching but has focused primarily on using English as the medium of instruction. However, teachers and students may not share a common language with which to communicate in a multilingual class, which is a significant challenge in Chinese learning and teaching. This study incorporates translanguaging into the pedagogical design by implementing a translanguaging-based task, perceiving Chinese learners as creative agents orchestrating numerous semiotic resources in meaning-making. The participants were a cohort of beginner-level Chinese learners with diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds taking an online Chinese course at a Chinese university. Data sources included the participants’ video-recorded oral presentations and their reflective journals. Drawing on social semiotic theory, analysis of the video recordings shows that the learners moved creatively between modalities (written and spoken, visual and auditory, gesture and drawing) that worked together as an assemblage to make meaning beyond their linguistic capacity while ensuring audience comprehension. The reflective journals, however, reveal ambivalent attitudes: using multilingual resources eased concerns about the audience’s reception of the participants’ meaning-making, but also generated guilt among the participants. Based on these findings, this study argues for the transformative power of translanguaging-based pedagogy and highlights the communicative affordance of semiotic resources including cultural artefacts and knowledge. The pedagogical implications of designing translanguaging-based tasks in the teaching of Chinese and other Asian languages are discussed.

A multimodal approach to English for academic purposes in contexts of diversity

AbstractThis article focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) in diverse and multilingual contexts. It draws on South Africa as an example of a multilingual, culturally diverse site in a recently decolonized country. Here theorizing and pedagogical practices around EAP often have a social justice agenda in order to redress the inequalities of the past. The importance of recognizing the multilingual and multimodal resources of students is highlighted in the teaching of academic writing. To this end, the article examines talk as an important mode in improving writing, drawing on multilingualism as a resource, working on screen versus page, the affordances of mind‐mapping and visualizing academic argument. The contention is that multimodal pedagogies can acknowledge students as agentive and creative meaning‐makers. This is particularly relevant in a context in which autonomous and decontextualized models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as ‘lacking’ in resources.

Negotiating the language of gender and sexuality

Abstract This case study focuses on the educational materials created by an NGO drop-in centre for the queer/questioning community in a Cambodian city. These materials consist of bilingual posters (English and Khmer) on display at the centre which provide explanations to those who make use of this space about diverse gender/sexual identities (LGBTQ+), as well as online resources featured on the NGO’s website/social media that raise awareness of these issues at both local and global levels. The study seeks to gain critical insight into the use of certain linguistic resources for sexuality education at this site of instruction. To do so, we present a multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of the materials, together with an analysis of metapragmatic reflections drawn from interviews conducted with the centre’s director. We therefore attend to how multilingual linguistic resources, and other semiotic forms, are being used to foster and shape knowledges about gender and sexualities at this site of community engagement, and how a metapragmatic negotiation of these knowledges in the interview reveals identity work that impacts these linguistic choices and their potential effects.

How to be authentic on Instagram

Abstract This paper analyses the way young people negotiate their ‘real’ identity on Instagram, and how self-presentation can be developed by means of language choice. We draw our data from the corpus of the Gaztesare project. It contains the Instagram production of Basque university students who draw on an inventory of multilingual resources in their interactions. We consider Instagram to be a multi-scalar context in which different orders of indexicality converge (Blommaert 2010). The study analyses, from this multi-scalar perspective, the place of Basque in the language choices the students make in order to belong, to be authentic as someone or something (Varis and Wang 2011). It concludes that local Basque dialects are tools for self-positioning as an ‘authentic’ voice in Instagram chat, but standard Batua, is empowering at a higher scale on Timelines, in which the same speakers use it for a more credible translocal voice.