Leveraging Translanguaging Flows in Chinese Character Lessons for Creative and Critical Learning

• In Event: New Pathways in Multimodal and Multilingual Learning: Moving Beyond Normative Practices

Abstract

Purposes
Research on translanguaging (TL) has proliferated in the past decade, particularly studies on English-Spanish dual language bilingual education (DLBE). Not much research, however, has been done on DLBE that involves English and other minoritized languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to the literature on TL in DLBE, particularly exploring the much under-researched Chinese-English programs. Using the latest conceptualizations of TL (Author 4, 2019) which emphasize that enlisting students’ full communicative repertoires – linguistic and non-linguistic – could provide multiple avenues to critically construct meaning and understand the mediated nature of all knowledge and ideas (Author 1, et al., 2021), we explored how TL can facilitate students’ Chinese character learning while promoting creative and critical engagements.

Theoretical framework
This paper takes an expansive understanding of TL theory, which furnishes a trans-systemic knowledge-making process, attending to not only language as languaging, but also the complex interactions and indexicalities between the linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and other modes (Kress, 2010). TL theory hence focuses on multilingual, multisemiotic, and multisensory processes of meaning making, taking into account that language learning and practice always involve whole-body experiences embedded in the dynamic flows and intra-activity among the linguistic and non-linguistic as well as human and material resources (Author 4, et al., 2020).

Methods and data sources
To explore the potential of pedagogical TL in Chinese vocabulary instruction, this paper focused on one Chinese Language Arts lesson from a larger study on TL design in a multi-ethnic Grade 3 Mandarin-English DLBE classroom in a U.S. public school. The teacher in this lesson provided an explicit instruction on word origins and knowledge and then students were encouraged to use their imagination to create visual narratives of different Chinese characters based on their orthography and semantics. We performed a fine-grained analysis of the teacher’s instructional practice and a multimodal analysis of children’s Chinese character art using Serafini’s (2009) visual grammar.

Results
We found that during the lesson, a heteroglossic learning environment was fostered in which the teacher and students co-acted with linguistic, semiotic, technological tools to develop their understanding of Chinese language and to (re)visualize alternative ways of interpreting Chinese characters. In addition, we also saw that the students’ word art design – the crossing between linguistic and visual signs – indexes their funds of knowledge and sociocultural values, which could potentially open up spaces for more critical discussions on the complex intersections of language, culture and beliefs.

Scholarly significance
This study offers a counter-narrative to challenge the monolingual approach in DLBE and demonstrates that leveraging TL flows in teaching and learning hold great pedagogical promises for multiple ways of knowing, feeling, experiencing, and meaning-making, opening up greater change-enhancing possibilities for L2 learners. We urge a paradigmatic shift for language teachers to see themselves not merely as teachers of a target language but also as teachers of languages and communication, raising a meta-awareness of how they themselves and their learners can use languages in combination with other semiotic resources to construct meaning and engage in communications.

Authors

• Zhongfeng Tian, Rutgers University - Newark
  Presenting Author

• Sunny Man Chu Lau, Bishop's University
  Non-Presenting Author