Translanguaging as a pedagogy: exploring the use of teachers’ and students’ bilingual repertoires in Chinese language education

4.1 Translanguaging use in classroom management instruction

Data indicate that in their classroom management, all the teachers used English as the medium of instruction as they were teaching the Chinese language to beginning school learners the majority of whom speak English as their first language. In common, there were some occasions when they switched from English to Chinese and added Chinese to their English. These were noted most frequently when providing classroom instructions, and/or emotionally engaging the learners. For example, Zhen used translanguaging in her classroom routines: “qǐ lì” (stand up), “qǐng zuò” (sit down please) and “zài jiàn” (goodbye). Yan provided student feedback with “Excellent!” followed with “bàng bàng da (棒棒哒)!” and accompanied both with a ‘thumbs up’ gesture. Yu commented “tài hăo le (great)!” with a high five gesture. Tang’s data included a short dialogue: “T: Good morning, guys. Nǐ hǎo ma? S: Hĕn hǎo! T: Very good! Jīntiān (today) we are going to learn how to say family members.” These data confirm that translanguaging was implemented in the forms of code-switching and translation as part of the teachers’ instructions to direct movement, provide positive feedback and introduce content.

During the interviews with each participant, they were asked to describe their pedagogical intentions and aims when they had implemented translanguaging. As all the students were beginning Chinese language learners with limited vocabulary, Tang reported the purpose was to facilitate students’ engagement as he explained:

When students were a bit bored by what was happening, I sensed the situation and would jam in one or two Chinese words to surprise them. They were like ‘what?’ and I would switch back to English and continue.

For Tang, his purpose was to keep the students curious, and responsive in trying to gauge the meaning of his use of Chinese. For Yan, when praoviding positive feedback to students, she preferred to use the Chinese translation so students would just ‘hang there’ in the moment – to prolong the experience for “students [to] enjoy the good comments.” For Zhen, the aim was to expose the students to ‘normal’ classroom routine directions using the Chinese language “to make them get used to some easy Chinese instruction.” These examples of translanguaging practice appeared to be sporadic, however not random. The teachers used translanguaging with pedagogical drive aiming to engage their learners.

4.2 Scaffolding the new learning

The data also reveal that the teachers employed translanguaging to scaffold students’ new learning. These include recognising the advantages of using both the teachers’ and students’ visual and expressive literacy from their L1 (teachers’ Chinese and students’ English). The two strategies employed were: (1) to draw on the learners’ capability of deduction already operating through prior L1 learning; and (2) to recognise the similar and contrasting pronunciation of the two languages’. For both strategies, the teacher-researchers’ use of translanguaging in these contexts aimed to reduce the learners’ cognitive load in learning L2 Chinese.

Examples of scaffolding the students’ new learning by building on their L1 (English) visual literacy were found in the teaching of pictographic words. The students were asked to draw on their prior experiences and their daily lives, to predict the meaning of some pictographs. For example, Tang and Yu, when introducing pictographs, asked their students to visualise an actual object each word appeared to represent and therefore to ‘guess’ what the pictograph might mean. The range of answers provided by the students was beyond the teachers’ expectations. In the stimulated recall interview with Tang and Yu, they both identified this phenomenon:

As I was teaching lower primary stage children, they sort of thought Chinese words were pictures and always like to comment: ‘It looks like a … ’ I made use of this advantage and taught them quite a few pictographs to start with. They were crazy about guessing the meaning based on the look. Sometimes their imagination went wild though. For example, when I showed them ‘网’ (net)’, and asked them what it looked like, I expected them to say ‘net’. However, many said it looked like a dead person, as the two crosses (xx) in English visual literacy means the closed eyes of a person. When I showed them ‘田’ (farmland), and I hoped they saw a crisscrossed farmland, but they saw a ‘chocolate block’. They also linked ‘水’ (water) to ‘lizard’ maybe because lizards are everywhere in their life (Tang).

I had a lot fun with them. I enjoyed teaching them Hànzì and asked them to guess the meaning. I remember when I taught them ‘吃’ (to eat), I asked them what the left and right looked like respectively. I thought they would say left part ‘口’ is a ‘mouth’, and right part is blah blah blah … but the students said it looked like an ‘ice block’. When I stretched my mouth into a square shape, they went: oh! It’s a mouth. They said the right top is the English letter T and the bottom is Z. They surprised me a lot – but what matters, I think, really is they were engaged in the process and made connections with what they had known (Yu).

The data indicate that the Chinese teachers created space for the students to attach meaning to the Chinese Hànzì through engaging their prior visual literacy knowledge. As expected though, the students’ visualisation reflected their perception of their local social and cultural environment, thus on many occasions their suggestions varied considerably from the Chinese teachers’ ‘visual product’. This reflects Li’s (2011) argument in terms of bilinguals bringing their personal experience, ideology and cognition into the new meaning making experience. According to these teachers, this multimodal or mnemonic translanguaging strategy proved to be effective in engaging students, stimulating their creative thinking and assisting the memorisation of some Chinese Hànzì.

Deductive reasoning, a higher level of translanguaging, is a strategy employed by the Chinese teachers. This was more frequently identified in their lessons where they scaffolded students’ comprehension of ideographic Hànzì. It is not as explicit as code-switching or translation; it is the deductive knowledge or capability to deduce, gained through L1 schooling, and was ‘trans-ed’ in this research to support the meaning making during the learning of Chinese words. An example Tang provided is when he taught students a set of three associated ideographs: ‘人’, ‘从’ and ‘众’, based on a singular person ‘人’. He guided the students, through induction, to reflect upon the meaning of the Hànzì comprised of two/double ‘人’ and three/triple ‘人’. Another example he gave is a set of indicatives: ‘上’ ‘下’ ‘卡’. From an epistemological viewpoint, he explained the representative meaning of the three strokes in the Hànzì ‘上’: a reference line at the bottom, a vertical line pointing to the north and a Chinese dot representing an object. He explained it is a location word, and it means ‘up’. He then asked students to work out the meaning of ‘下’ and ‘卡’ by applying the same type of reasoning. This strategy worked well due to the indicative and ideographic nature of Hànzì, with success noted in terms of motivating the learners, developing creative learning contexts and associative memorisation.

When teaching Chinese pronunciation, some teachers intentionally guided the students to be mindful of the phonetic systems of the two languages through comparing the similarities, contrasts, or differences. Students were then able to link the pronunciation of Chinese words to ‘Australian Pinyin’. An example in Yu’s lesson was when she compared the Chinese vowel ‘ā’ to the ‘a’ sound in ‘glass’, ‘ē’ to ‘ir’ sound in fur, ī to ‘ea’ sound in ‘tea’, and ū to the ‘oo’ sound in ‘fool’. Similarly, Zhen purposively used English phonetic knowledge to help students with Chinese pronunciation. She constructed lessons where the Chinese pronunciation was scaffolded to the existing English phonation system. For example, when teaching greetings in Chinese, Zhen explained that ‘nĭhǎo’ (你好 hello) sounded like the English words ‘knee’ [nɪ:] and ‘how’ [haʊ], ‘wǎn ān’ (晚安 good night) sounded like ‘one’ [wʌn] ‘Anne’ [æn]. When introducing the Chinese vocabulary around the theme ‘colour’, she guided the students to think of ‘lǜ sè’ (green) as ‘loser’ [’lu:zə], ‘hēi sè’ (black) as ‘hey’ [hei] ‘sir’ [sɜ:], and ‘bái sè’ (白色 white) ‘bye’ [baɪ] ‘sir’ [sɜ:] (Zhen). As her lessons progressed Zhen noted the students creating their own English and Chinese sound connections: “After they learned bā (eight), I couldn’t stop them making sheep sound of ‘baa, baa, baa … ’ and when we learned méi (eyebrow) and bí (nose), they went ‘maybe, maybe, maybe … ’.” These examples of ‘trans-ing’ between English and Chinese in learning pronunciation facilitated student-centred experiences and engagement. From a cognitive perspective, this translanguaging mnemonic technique is valuable. By associating a new facet of the L2 learning to ‘something’ familiar to the learners in their L1, the teachers made L2 learning more accessible or meaningful to the students (Tai and Li 2021).

4.3 Translanguaging activities for transforming learning

Translanguaging practice was reflected in the activities these teachers designed specifically for transforming the learning. Quite often the Chinese language teachers drew on both their own and their students’ resources to design activities such as multimodality exercises, shū kòng (write/writing in the air), music, calligraphy, colouring in and paper cutting. More accurately, these resources themselves are learning activities from both the teachers’ L1 (Chinese) and students’ L1 (English) experiences. They were not simple trans-activities between languages, but languaging practice embedded in these ‘trans-ing’ activities.

In terms of practising listening and speaking, some teacher-researchers designed multimodal activities. For example, for reviewing the vocabulary learned for body parts, Yun introduced the nursery rhyme, ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ for her younger students. She created opportunities for them to sing the song in Chinese. Zhen’s activity was to combine the melody of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ with the lyrics of the Chinese song ‘nĭ hǎo gē’ (你好歌, Hello Song) for students to practice. Shu planned for the students to sing the Chinese version of ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’ once they were familiar with the Pinyin lyrics. According to the data revealed during the stimulated recall sessions, engaging students’ familiar melodies seemed to be an effective way to motivate participation and improve their oral Chinese. According to Fan, students often had “an ‘a-ha’ moment” with their familiar melodies. Yun’s experience was that it is a “pleasant way to practice oral Chinese” especially when the students were allowed to “switch back to English or hum along with the tune when they forgot the Chinese lyrics”. Shu’s data indicated“Students were focused while doing the activities and remembered words very well after a few times repeating the same song”.

For Hànzì writing exercises, the most prevalent activities were ‘shū kòng’ (writing in the air), paper cutting, colouring in and calligraphy. Their purpose was to create opportunities for students to make use of the available Chinese and English teaching resources, to review and become familiar with the written form of the learned Hànzì. ‘Shū kòng’ (书空) is an old-fashioned practice of writing in the air. Tang recorded his use of ‘shū kòng’ with his classes. After learning several new words, he would engage the students in a “finger dance”. He admitted that it was “not an exciting activity” but students were “not badly engaged”. Fan (and also Tang, Yun and Ning) provided calligraphy practice for students to experience and sense Hànzì as symbols of Chinese art and culture. Students “enjoyed it” while becoming familiar with the structure of learned Hànzì. Compared with her other peer teachers, Yan preferred ‘colouring in’ – an activity with which local students were familiar. She acted on one student’s suggestion that “their other teachers used it”. She said: “This is one of the few activities I used to settle them down and make them concentrate”. Fan regularly provided ‘paper cutting’ activities in her class. She explained her students were particularly “excited about cutting those symmetrical Hànzì such as “山,天,林, 中”. They were “very creative” and were able to extrapolate their thinking to include words in English that were symmetrical such as mom, dad, eye and aha.

The activities these teachers designed and implemented were focussed on ‘learning by doing’. Their purpose was to have young learners become familiar with the ‘sound’, or the ‘look’ of Hànzì in order for learning to be more smoothly internalised. During this process, these teachers integrated translanguaging practice through switching and intertwining the two languages. They combined lingual and aural modes across the two languages, as well as specifically melding the teaching resources from both systems – Chinese calligraphy and English colouring in.

4.4 Translanguaging to assess learning

Translanguaging activities were identified in the Chinese teachers’ suite of strategies including those for assessing students’ learning. For example, Tang played Bingo – a popular game amongst the local students, designed to test listening and identification of vocabulary. The game commenced with the teacher verbalising a Chinese word, and the students were asked to find the equivalent English on their card and cross it out. Tang recalled: “it was a competition game. It was challenging but the young learners really loved it as they all wanted to be the first person to cross out all their words and call out bingo.” Another teacher Ning designed a Digital Storytelling assignment to examine the students’ written comprehension. In the assignment, she required the students to compose a Chinese story using the sentence patterns and words they had been learning, that is, incorporating the vocabulary for body parts, fruit, ball games, colours, and the names of animals. She encouraged the students to use English and Chinese Pīnyīn to facilitate the completion of their stories. Ning recounted: “The thrilling part of the task was that the students all had their passionate story to tell. Some students were addicted to it and even tried to make their story twist and turn so that they could use more [Chinese] words they remembered.” This assessment task reflects the teachers’ insightful use of translanguaging as a facilitator for Chinese language learning.

5.1 Translanguaging instruction

Early research purports a long-established norm of monolingualism in language education (Blackledge 2000; García 2009b). CAL literature also identifies the decades where Chinese Medium Instruction and rigorous Chinese monolingual pedagogy in Chinese classrooms in China’s higher education system were promoted (Wang 2014; Wang 2019b). Similarly promoted were Chinese-only policies and practices across CFL immersion programmes in North America (Lü 2020: Zhou, 2021: 103). As Wang and Kirkpatrick (2012) critiqued, these positions in language education are more political than scientific; CAL teachers did so or were asked to do so to show their strong “national pride” and to build or maintain their “Sinophone identity” in front of their ‘foreign’ students (Wang and Kirkpatrick 2012:15). Consequently, translanguaging use such as code-switching and translation is predominantly regarded as detrimental. Under this regime it can be argued that institutions’ and/or teachers’ monolingual ideology were prioritised at the cost of students’ learning. This research has identified alternative evidence and promising results. That is, these Chinese teacher-researchers who were vested in a specific language teaching and research Programme at an Australian University used English as the main language of instruction along with Chinese to facilitate instruction in order to meet the learning needs of the beginning Chinese learners. Embracing translanguaging through switching and translating between the two languages was strategic as they had a strong commitment to motivating and engaging the learners. Their own identity of being a Chinese language teacher was not a priority when they ‘trans-ed’ the instruction. Their translanguaging practices perhaps indicates an identity shift towards a ‘bilingual language teacher’ and distanced from ‘Chinese language teacher’.

5.2 Translanguaging resources

As discussed in the theory section, scholars widely acknowledge the scope of translanguaging as a meaning-making and knowledge construction process (Baker 2011; García 2009a; Li 2011; Li 2018) involving the implementation of a range of lingual and non-lingual resources. They recognise the lingual resources of bi- and multilingual speakers as being assessable through their multilingual literacy and multiliteracy capacities, and non-lingual resources through personal experience, ideology, cognitive capacity and cultural knowledge (García 2009a; Li 2011). The data in this research foregrounds the CAL teachers’ specific and strategic use of translanguaging resources as they ‘trans-ed’ languages. This includes integrating English and Chinese in the form of code-switching and translation, designing multimodal exercises such as combining lingual and visual or aural modes across the two languages (for example, singing Chinese lyrics with an English melody and vice versa) and bringing their aural systems into comparison when teaching pronunciation. More importantly, they ‘trans-ed’ the resources in the two systems carried by the languages. They unified theirs and/or their students’ funds of knowledge in the two systems by using learners’ prior knowledge of deduction and reasoning in explaining Chinese Hànzì formation. They also incorporated pedagogical and cultural resources from both systems by embracing Chinese calligraphy and paper cutting, English colouring in and the Bingo game to engage students in Chinese language learning. These activities permeated the curriculum designed by these teacher-researchers, demonstrating their commitment to achieving learning outcomes for all students. Additionally, the translanguaging practices described in the previous sections provide evidence that the teachers attempted to equalise resources and knowledge across both the English and Chinese systems. This indicates a measure of progress for the teacher-researchers in recognising themselves and the students as double-resourced and double-knowing agents. This echoes Cenoz and Gorter’s (2020: 307) recent argument that pedagogical translanguaging should aim at using “the knowledge multilinguals have” from “their own linguistic and educational background”. The practices of these teacher-researchers has the potential to contribute to ‘best practice’ evidence in the development of translanguaging in Chinese language education.

5.3 Translanguaging activities

Further to the translanguaging practices identified within instruction and resources, the data also indicate that this group of teachers demonstrated advanced pedagogical use of translanguaging. By ‘advanced’, they went beyond merely creating space in class, optimistically waiting for translanguaging to evolve. They demonstrated that translanguaging can be a systematic and purposeful pedagogical practice (Canagarajah 2011; Cenoz and Gorter 2020). Resonating with Wang’s (2019a) finding on the creation of translanguaging strategies to cognitively scaffold students’ meaning-making and comprehension by teachers, this research found that translanguaging activities were designed around and for the students. Although not all the teachers equally showed systematic translanguaging use, their data collectively contributes to an understanding of the possibilities for a successful multi-dimensional translanguaging teaching process. Translanguaging was not practiced randomly. Rather, the translanguaging activities were pedagogically driven with the needs of the learners focused at the centre. The implementation of activities was to motivate and connect with students emotionally, to engage their participation in class and to scaffold their learning to reduce their cognitive load.

The research findings discussed above are in discord with early scholars’ perceptions of CAL in Australia as incorporating teacher-centred methods implemented by teachers with a limited knowledge of their learners and teaching resources (Moloney 2013; Moloney and Xu 2015; Orton 2015, 2016; Wang et al. 2013). The participants in this research, whilst fulfilling a teaching assignment as teacher trainees in local schools, were concurrently studying in an Australian university’s post-graduate degree – an innovative teacher-researcher education programme. As part of the curriculum designed to inform their teaching and research, they were introduced to linguistics, encompassing translanguaging, and educational theories such as constructivist pedagogy. They learned to use research to inform their teaching, and conversely, how to solve teaching challenges through research. This specialised Programme coupled with the positive value Australia holds for multilingual resources in education, may have provided these Chinese language teachers with the skills and confidence to focus their teaching pragmatically on catering to the needs of their beginning Chinese language learners from design to implementation.