International Journal of Bilingual Education and

Bilingualism

ISSN: 1367-0050 (Print) 1747-7522 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbeb20

Translanguaging in Chinese foreign language

classrooms: students and teachers’ attitudes and
practices

Danping Wang

To cite this article: Danping Wang (2016): Translanguaging in Chinese foreign language
classrooms: students and teachers’ attitudes and practices, International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2016.1231773

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1231773

Published online: 16 Sep 2016.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1231773

Translanguaging in Chinese foreign language classrooms:

students and teachers’ attitudes and practices
Danping Wanga,b
a
Department of General Education and Languages, Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China; bFaculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s
Republic of China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article deals with the reality and complexity of emergent Received 15 November 2015
translanguaging in foreign language classrooms. The influx of Accepted 30 August 2016
international learners of Chinese has resulted in linguistically diverse
KEYWORDS
classrooms, posing huge challenges to the monolingual teaching Translanguaging;
approach that prevails in most Chinese language classrooms. This paper multilingualism; language
explores what students and teachers think and do about choice; Chinese
translanguaging practices in beginners’ classes in China’s universities. A
questionnaire survey of 201 students showed that over half of the
sample population was inclined to a multilingual form of instruction,
where they could draw on their linguistic resources for meaning
negotiation. Results from semi-structured interviews with teachers
revealed ambivalent attitudes towards classroom language choice. While
some teachers found it difficult to accommodate multilingualism, others
embraced this idea and have developed a translanguaging pedagogy.
Lastly, classroom observation demonstrated translanguaging as a co-
constructed dialogic approach, initiated by both teachers and students
to keep the class communicative within the Confucius learning culture.
This paper ends by offering suggestions for foreign language teachers to
renew their knowledge on language learning as well as develop
transformative student–teacher relationships in order to facilitate more
creative pedagogy in foreign language education.

Introduction
The monolingual strategy has long been the norm in classroom language teaching, under the influ-
ence of predominant national ideologies and language policies across different countries (Blackledge
2000; García 2009; McMillan and Rivers 2011; Igboanusi 2014; Makalela 2015). As a critique of this lin-
guistic purism, a number of similar neologisms were created to capture the complexity of multilingual
reality in different contexts and social domains, such as codemeshing (Canagarajah 2011a), metrolin-
gualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010), continua of biliteracy (Hornberger 2003) and translanguaging
(Hornberger and Link 2012; García and Li 2014; Li 2014). The recent profusion of overlapping termi-
nology has convincingly affirmed the paradigmatic shift from monolingualism to plurilingualism in
language education and sociolinguistic research (Canagarajah 2011b; Lin 2013b). Among these
new concepts, Wiley and García (2016) commented that translanguaging specifically calls for flexible
instructional strategies in foreign language teaching. In brief, translanguaging refers to the process of
using one’s full linguistic repertoire ‘to gain knowledge, to make sense, to articulate one’s thoughts
and to communicate about using language’ (Li 2011). The notion of translanguaging is central to

CONTACT Danping Wang dpwang@vtc.edu.hk; danpingwang@hku.hk

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. WANG

conceptualising the communicative strategies that multilinguals display in classroom contexts. The
term owns a theoretical and epistemological rigour that makes it suitable to be employed to interpret
emerging pedagogical phenomena in international foreign language classrooms.
This study is within the context of the worldwide burgeoning of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign
language (CFL) programmes (Lo Bianco 2007). An increasing number of international CFL students
are learning Chinese as a foreign or additional language, mostly after learning English or one or
two other important languages in their home countries (Wang 2014). Their arrival has resulted in lin-
guistically diverse classrooms, posing a huge challenge to the monolingual teaching approach that
prevails in most CFL classrooms in and outside China. Innovative pedagogies to make Chinese teach-
ing more accessible to multilingual students has become a pressing research agenda for CFL teaching
professionals to achieve effective learning outcomes in the United States (Zhang, Ruan, and Leung
2015), Australia (Moloney and Xu 2015), Europe (Bao and Du 2015) and many other countries and
regions. It is equally important to understand how Chinese teachers attempt to alter their perceptions
and adjust their teaching strategies in response to the need to sustain effective teaching in multilin-
gual reality. Up to now, not much has been heard of students’ and teachers’ views of classroom
language policies in CFL teaching, and their actual language choices and practices.

Theoretical frameworks
A growing body of research on the emergent translanguaging paradigm has been carried out to the-
orise the novel term translanguaging in the areas of bilingual education (Creese and Blackledge 2010;
Mazak and Herbas-Donoso 2014; Probyn 2015), content and language integrated learning contexts
(Moore 2014; Cenoz and Ruiz de Zarobe 2015) and sociolinguistic studies (Gu 2014). This article situ-
ates translanguaging practices in international foreign language classrooms where students usually
come from many different linguistic backgrounds and teachers are native Chinese-speaking, English-
knowing bilinguals. The complexity of their everyday interaction has created a dynamic translangua-
ging space (García and Li 2014, 24). In spite of the fact that the term ‘translanguaging’ was initially
created to address language use in bilingual classrooms in Wales (Williams 1996), this term can be
extended as a conceptual framework to interpret hybridity and creativity of language use in other
foreign language classrooms, where the high degree of diversity of students’ linguistic and cultural
backgrounds means that they can draw on huge linguistic resources. As García (2011) pointed out,
language classrooms in the twenty-first century are moving from monolingualism towards translin-
gualism, encouraging flexible concurrent language use rather than continuing to keep students’ lin-
guistic knowledge separate or treating prior languages as non-existent or purely negative influences.
Over the last three decades, many studies have confirmed that the overarching monolingualism in
foreign language teaching is ‘undesirable, unrealistic and untenable’ (Levine 2011, 70). An equal
number of studies have contributed to liberating foreign language teachers and learners from the
narrow constraints of monolingual norms (Auerbach 1993; Cook 2001; Butzkamm 2003, 2011; Butz-
kamm and Caldwell 2009). Meanwhile, these studies have advanced theoretical evidence that stu-
dents’ linguistic resources have tremendous pedagogical, psychological and cognitive functions in
foreign language classrooms, if used in a judicious manner (Turnbull 2001; Turnbull and Arnett
2002; Carless 2008; Turnbull and Dailey-O’Cain 2009; Lee and Macaro 2013; Moore 2013; Lin 2015).
In terms of methodology, studies have mostly adopted interactional sociolinguistic and ethnography
of communication approaches to identity functional categories of L1 use in L2 classrooms (Lin 2010).
Some studies have used quantitative approaches to measure the relative amounts of L1 and L2 use in
natural classroom settings (Duff and Polio 1990; Rolin-Ianziti and Brownlie 2002; Yan et al. 2015).
Others have adopted a qualitative principle to provide a descriptive taxonomy to categorise the func-
tional use of L1 in L2 classrooms (Polio and Duff 1994; Swain and Lapkin 2000; Cook 2001; Canagar-
ajah 2011a; Lin 2015). For example, Cook (2001, 413–419) proposed a three-dimensional framework
to analyse the role of L1: (1) teachers use L1 to convey meaning; (2) teachers use L1 to organise the
class and (3) students use L1 within the class. Clearly, classroom language practices can be further
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 3

categorised according to the initiator of the conversation that triggered the use of the L1. According
to Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012), and García and Li (2014), there are two types of translanguaging
strategies: (1) ‘teacher-directed translanguaging’ to give voice, clarity, reinforce, manage the class-
room and ask questions and (2) ‘student-directed translanguaging’ to participate, to elaborate
ideas, to raise questions. The previous classroom-based research offered rich frameworks to draw
on in analysing how teachers and students actually behave with multiple languages in different
contexts.
Furthermore, recent research has recorded an increasing number of studies designed to under-
stand the classroom participants’ views about classroom language choice (Levine 2011). Macaro’s
(2009) continuum of perspectives on multiple language use has been frequently adopted to
analyse teachers’ attitudes towards language choices. The continuum consists of virtual, maximal
and optimal positions, demonstrating the perspectives ranging from monolingualism to multilingu-
alism. That is, the virtual position prescribes the exclusive use of the target language. The maximal
position subscribes to the idea that teachers should maximise L2 use, while usually feeling guilty
for switching between students’ L1 and the L2. The optimal position holds a multilingual perspective,
recognising value in L1 use but without any pedagogical regrets. Drawing on this continuum, Wang
and Kirkpatrick (2012) interviewed 24 Chinese language teachers in China; they found that some tea-
chers mixed English as a lingua franca with Chinese to keep the class communicative in spite of the
monolingual principle. The study showed that teachers were in need of theoretical and practical
support to make their teaching more effective. Focusing on students, Wu (2006), Li and Wu (2009)
found creative classroom language practices of learners of Chinese in the UK, regardless of the ten-
sions between monolingual ideologies and policies in schools. Similarly, Zhang (2007) reported that
nearly a half of the surveyed learners of Chinese have had mixed English with Chinese to ask ques-
tions in a Chinese language class, others used their home languages or familiar languages, such as
Korean, to negotiate meanings, often behind the teacher’s back, in fear of being punished as a
result of the Chinese-only principle. In this section, the paper discussed the framework to
analyse classroom participants’ attitudes towards language choice, and also alluded that
language choice is in fact under the influence of many sociocultural factors such as the predominant
education philosophy and popular language learning beliefs, as well as a wider socio-political status
quo.

Sociocultural environment
The number of international CFL students in Mainland China has surged rapidly to a record high of
397,635, arriving from 203 countries in 2015, according to statistics provided by the Ministry of Edu-
cation (MoE) of the People’s Republic of China (MoE 2016). In this respect, the extreme diversity of CFL
classrooms in China makes a perfect case in point for the translanguaging space. Each classroom rep-
resents a small fraction of the student population, with enormous individual diversity in race, ethni-
city, education and languages spoken. Learning CFL within mixed linguistic groups, students often
draw on their existing languages to learn and to communicate with Chinese–English bilingual CFL
teachers and multilingual peers. Nevertheless, the development and practices of flexible pedagogical
strategies may be constrained by the deep-rooted ideology of purism, stemming from traditional cul-
tures of learning, monolingual language policies or the political aspirations of a nation-state (Wang
2015).
The dominant Confucius-influenced learning culture can make it difficult to recognise the multi-
lingual reality in CFL classrooms (Cortazzi and Jin 1996; Deng 2011). Chinese teachers educated in the
Chinese education system may have a low awareness of the importance of encouraging students’
oral engagement or of allowing them freedom to express personal ideas and a low tolerance of per-
mitting classroom teaching to depart from a one-way flow of communication. As a result, Chinese
classrooms are more teacher-centred and form-focused. In contrast to the Aristotelian learning phil-
osophy that is built on spontaneous interaction and discussion-based learning activities,
4 D. WANG

Confucianism is prone to a monoglossic pedagogy and monoglot ideology in language education

and language use (see Zhou and Li 2015).
Second, plurilingualism is often inhibited in local contexts where official education policy dis-
courses have a long-standing endorsement of monolingual classroom methodologies (Lin 2013a).
The Chinese language is the ‘basic medium of instruction’ and a compulsory learning module, regard-
less of major area of study, for all international students studying within higher education in Mainland
China (MoE 2000). In line with the traditional pedagogical approach, ‘Chinese-only’ has been the pre-
dominant language policy across many CFL programmes (Wang 2014). CFL teaching borrowed the
term ‘immersion’ from these programmes in North America, and used it in promoting the monolin-
gual Chinese-only principle in Chinese classrooms. The total immersion approach adopted by, for
example, Middlebury College and Princeton in Beijing, has been regarded as one of the most
useful strategies enabling rapid learning progress and critical success (McGinnis 1997, 232). Known
for their rigorous monolingual pedagogy, immersion programmes have thrived in China for over
two decades, where students’ voices and home languages are seen as detrimental to L2 learning
and thus have been kept compartmentalised.
The phenomenon of rising linguistic purism, as a response to the hegemonic internationalisation
of English, imposes another layer of ideological constraint on the recognition and development of
translanguaging as a legitimate pedagogy. In some international Chinese classrooms, the major con-
tention regarding language choice lies in the intricate relationship between Chinese and English.
Wang (2007) warned front-line teachers that the use of English in CFL classrooms only led to the dis-
semination of English to international learners, which was against the fundamental mission of
Chinese language teaching. Further, Zhao and Huang (2010) stated that CFL teaching also has the
status of a national cause, assuming the role of boosting national pride, and hence should be focusing
only on promoting the Chinese language. Outside the classroom, nationwide campaigns were
launched to reduce contact with other languages as well as the infiltration of other cultures, to
protect the long-term development of national stability and prosperity (Flowerdew and Li 2009;
The Economist 2010). Taking account of the wide sociocultural environment, the study sought to
understand the views and practices of translanguaging on the part of international learners of
Chinese and Chinese language teachers. Specifically, the three research questions for this study
were (1) what are students’ attitudes towards translanguaging? (2) what are teachers’ attitudes
towards translanguaging? and (3) what are teachers’ and students’ practices towards translanguaging
in Chinese language classrooms?

Research design
In order to provide a holistic picture of the three research questions, the research design of this study
included (1) a questionnaire survey to understand students’ attitudes; (2) in-depth interviews to
understand teachers’ attitudes and (3) classroom observation to understand language practices in
natural settings. Adopting an extreme case sampling (Given 2008, 697), this study focused only on
beginners’ classes, where students’ Chinese language was limited, and therefore they were more
likely to resort to other languages for scaffolding. It was also because the majority of the students
of Chinese were at the beginning level in the research sites. The study reported part of the data
from a project conducted on this topic with international CFL students in Beijing’s universities
during 2010–2012.
First, a bilingual questionnaire was given to survey students’ attitudes towards multiple language
use. Considering the variation in students’ proficiency, the questionnaire was bilingual in English and
Chinese, and later checked by one Chinese expert and one English expert. Similarly, the technical
term, translanguaging, was not directly presented to teachers and students. Questionnaires were dis-
tributed at the beginning of regular classes. The return rate was 98.2% (225 handed out with 221
returned, and 201 valid).
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 5

Second, an in-depth interview method was adopted to collect qualitative data from teacher par-
ticipants, since interviews can ‘yield direct quotations from people about their experiences, opinions,
feelings and knowledge’ (Patton 2002, 4). Invitations were sent to 29 teachers; only three young
Chinese teachers agreed to participate in the interviews and open their classrooms for observation.
The criteria for teacher selection were (1) currently teaching beginning Chinese and (2) open to
research on their classroom language use. The interview protocol was semi-structured and partici-
pants were encouraged to elaborate on issues raised (Dörnyei 2007, 136). The three teacher partici-
pants chose to use Mandarin Chinese for interview, which was their native language, and the class
target language, as they believed this would ‘save time’. Each participant was interviewed for 30
to 50 minutes. Interview transcripts were transcribed verbatim. The data analysis adopted a structural
coding method (Saldaña 2013, 84), which allows the researcher to access data quickly in order to gen-
erate frequently appearing themes.
Following the interviews, beginners’ classes held by the three teachers were observed and audio-
recorded. Classroom observation was suitable for collecting evidence of CFL students’ and teachers’
language choices and practices in naturalistic settings. Each recorded class lasted for 90 minutes. In
total around 280 minutes of classroom teaching were represented in this study. Due to the acoustic
difficulty in discriminating different languages in natural classroom settings, the paper was not able
to present data about students’ translanguaging in many other languages except for English. Data
analysis used open coding of data to allow sufficient possibility of emerging categories of strategies
from classroom interaction.

Findings
Research question 1: students’ attitudes
All surveyed students were college-aged adult learners, aged between 19 and 25. There were 56.7%
(n = 114) male students and 43.3% (n = 87) female students. They were from 27 countries, speaking
22 different home languages. Student participants were mostly bilingual or multilingual speakers:
91.0% (n = 183) of the total sample population reported being able to speak at least one foreign
language with a certain proficiency, excluding Chinese and their L1s. Among the 183 students,
61.7% (n = 124) were able to speak one foreign language; 22.9% (n = 46) were able to speak two
foreign languages; and 6.5% (n = 13) could speak three or more foreign languages. Specifically,
over 80.6% (n = 162) of the total sample reported English as their first foreign language, and the
foreign language in which they were most proficient. This explains the reason why English was
often adopted as a lingua franca by the group of students in their classrooms.
Students were asked to describe their desired classroom language use and actual language use. For
their desired language use, 58.1% opted for ‘Chinese-only’, 29.4% chose ‘Chinese and some English’,
and 12.5% wanted to use ‘Chinese and L1s’. As for their actual language practices, 42.5% stayed with
‘Chinese-only’; 41.0% reported mixing ‘Chinese and some English’, and 16.5% students admitted to
mixing ‘Chinese and L1s’ in class. Following this, they were asked to describe the desired classroom
language use for their teachers. 46.5% preferred teachers to follow the monolingual principle,
50.8% wanted their teacher to use English as a lingua franca and 2.7% of students hoped their tea-
chers would use their L1s. Clearly, the result showed that students’ attitudes towards monolingual
and multilingual approaches were nearly equally divided. In a sense, the part of the study proved
that students had pragmatic attitudes towards classroom language use. The situation corresponded
to what Levine (2003) found in his survey to understand students’ views in classroom language use.
The study also paid attention to students who reported knowing no foreign languages in addition
to their L1s. Of all the sample population, 9.0% (n = 18) were able to speak ONLY an L1, which were
Japanese and Korean in this study. Theoretically, a smaller linguistic pool or weaker proficiency in
certain languages indeed has limited one’s translanguaging possibilities; in reality, the study
observed frequent peer-support during classroom observation (see research question 3). Though
6 D. WANG

not statistically, the study showed that students with more linguistic resources and stronger profi-
ciency were more inclined to help their peers.

Research question 2: teachers’ attitudes

Teacher 1 (T1) was 30, female, has a first degree in English and a second degree in Teaching CFL. Base
on her interview data, T1 was categorised as holding the ‘optimal’ position. T1 quoted a Chinese
proverb to epitomise her ideas about the medium of instruction – It does not matter if a cat is
black or white, as long as it catches mice – one which was first put forward by Deng Xiaoping to
kindle and justify flexible pragmatism in Chinese government policy since the 1990s. In the interview,
T1 further stated:
I don’t have problems seeing my students speaking English, Korean or Japanese as long as they speak it for the
purpose of learning Chinese. I can put myself into their shoes, thinking how difficult it is to learn a new language
from the very beginning in a new country.

But we all have a period of time trying to express our ideas in broken English mixing Chinese words [when learn-
ing English as a foreign language]. It’s only a process.

She concluded that her attitude towards translanguaging was practical – anything useful to achieve
the primary goal should be strategically employed. As a fluent English speaker, T1 wanted to add a
few more foreign languages to her linguistic repertoire in order to create a more balanced opportu-
nity for her multilingual class. Drawing on her own experience of learning a foreign language, T1
expressed her views of translanguaging pedagogy as a process not a product of L2 learning,
which also helped to explain her guilt-free attitude towards multilingualism.
Teacher 2 (T2) was 27, female, with a first degree in Chinese Literature and a Master’s Degree in
Teaching CFL. T2 was categorised as in a ‘virtual position’ because she made it clear that she preferred
to use solely Chinese in class. For instance,
The primary goal for teaching Chinese is to see the world having more people speaking Chinese. […] It is, after all,
not professional for a Chinese teacher to speak other languages in class. When Chinese people speak, we don’t
mix other languages. Codeswitching will ruin the purity of Chinese. I am setting a role for them. I don’t want my
students to develop this bad habit. […] Besides, it will be too noisy to let them speak their languages.

As can be seen from her interview, T2 argued that a teacher’s classroom language practices should
comply with the country’s aspirations for cultural development. Her statement about protecting the
national language from contamination from other languages is clearly what Cole and Meadows
(2013) called nationalist essentialism. T2 believed a CFL teacher must be a role model of language
use and demonstrate good language practice in class. Clearly, she took a product-oriented perspec-
tive on language use as she thought translanguaging was a ‘bad habit’. For a foreign language
teacher who regarded students’ voices as ‘noisy’, tensions can be anticipated when the single-
voiced Confucius educational philosophy was disrupted by Bakhtin’s heteroglossia (Blackledge and
Creese 2014). The modern translanguaging philosophy and strategy may not be encouraged in situ-
ations where monolingual perspectives were central to the educational mission.
Teacher 3 (T3) was 25, female, with a first and a second degree in Chinese Literature from a uni-
versity in northern China. T2 accepted the invitation to participate in this study because she herself
recently experienced a critical change in her professional trajectory from being a Chinese L1 teacher
to a Chinese L2 teacher. She recognised the importance of translanguaging in L2 teaching, yet her
linguistic repertoire gives her very little choice.
I was trained to teach Chinese literature to our students [native Chinese] […] I knew some English would help but
my English is so poor. So in the beginning, I had to request all my students to speak ONLY Chinese in my class,
which makes it easier for me to take control [of the class].

T2’s comments showed some Chinese classrooms might be experiencing a ‘forced’ monolingualism,
simply because Chinese teachers were not confident enough to translanguage to manage a
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 7

multilingual classroom though they hoped to do so. She found herself more comfortable in a
Chinese-only class because the monolingual setting could endow her with a sense of authority. T3
agreed that the translanguaging pedagogy was tremendously helpful in communication with stu-
dents after class, but she also admitted she has attempted to develop techniques to help students
who needed more support from the teacher. She agreed that the necessary communication
between teachers and students would be held back if teachers simply requested students to ‘keep
silent and just listen’, instead of helping students to figure out the meaning of a lesson at the
time. Nevertheless, her linguistic pool was not ready for her to explore more options to help students
with little Chinese proficiency.

Research question 3: translanguaging practices in Chinese classrooms

Classroom data from this study was divided into the teacher-initiated translanguaging (explanatory
strategy and managerial strategy) and student-initiated translanguaging (interpersonal strategy). In
total, 33 cases were identified under the category of explanatory strategy, 36 of managerial strategy
and 19 of interpersonal strategy. However, this classification is highly context-specific hence should
not be generalised. There were a few cases belonged to more than one category but were only
counted once. It is important to note that all the three teachers adopted a de facto multilingual
approach in classroom teaching. In particular, T2 also occasionally translanguaged for pedagogical
purposes regardless of what she said in her interview. She did not forcefully inhibit students from
using multiple languages to exchange information in her class.

Explanatory strategies
The first type of translanguaging pedagogy initiated by teachers is to provide cognitive or metalin-
guistic scaffolding for meaning-making activities such as explaining and elaborating grammar rules
and lexical uses, translating new words, and interpreting cultural meaning. Extract 1 offered an
example.

Extract 1
Student: Last weekend, 我买一双眼镜 (I bought a pair of glasses).
Teacher: No, 眼镜 (optical glasses) is not 一双 (a classifier meaning ‘pair’). You can say 一双眼睛 (a pair of eyes),
eyes, 一双眼睛 (a pair of eyes). But don’t say 一双眼镜 (a pair of glasses).
Student: Hmm, but they all come in pairs.
Teacher: 对 (Right), But 眼镜是一个东西 (one object), just one thing, not two things. 我们说一副眼镜(We say
a set of glasses.)

Dodson’s (1985) Sandwich Method (L2-L1-L2) has been strategically adopted to build a nexus
between students’ inputs and teachers’ outputs. The teacher naturally offered the translation of
the new phrase and reinforced the Chinese by repeating it twice; these kinds of translanguaging
practices occurred very frequently when students initiated a question or used a new Chinese word
the class had not learned, or when the teacher foresaw the need to alleviate the difficulty of her
instruction of tasks. Notably, the teacher’s language may be of some grammatical problems but
her efforts in answering student’s question was well received.

Managerial strategies
The managerial strategy provides operational classroom instructions such as giving instructions for
an activity, giving feedback, praising, disapproving, checking the comprehension of learning
content and planning assignments. For example,

Extract 2
Teacher: Don’t forget 你的作业 (your homework).
Student: You want a soft copy or should we write on paper?
8 D. WANG

Teacher: Copy? No copy!

Student: Soft copy. Computer.
Teacher: No, no, no. 手写 (by hand) by hand. 同学们(class) 作业 (homework)by hand, not by computer.

It was noticeable that the teacher misunderstood the student’s question about ‘soft copy’, thinking
the student meant to plagiarise. The student repeated it while complementing it with body language
to facilitate communication. In the recording, it was possible to hear very clearly that students in this
class were confirming with each other the homework requirements through their individual L1s –
Korean – in this case.

Interpersonal strategies
This category was mostly initiated by students. They often interacted with each other using multiple
languages to translate questions raised by teachers to classmates sitting nearby. Data showed that
teacher participants negotiated meaning with students in a role as a co-learner, which can be
seen in Extract 3.

Extract 3
Student: What does it mean? Like in 汽水 (soft drink) and 空气 (air).
Teacher: Ah. 不一样 (not the same). 空气(air). This is gas in the air. 汽水 (soft drink). This is vipo, veipo?
Student: Vapour?
Teacher: Vapour.

This part of the data echoed what Li (2014) and Li and Wu (2009) found in Chinese complementary
schools in the UK, with similar examples of students teaching the teachers, with their strong linguistic
knowledge. It also offered supporting cases in a modern foreign language teaching setting for what
Creese (2008) argued about the various levels of English-speaking ability of Chinese teachers, mostly
not as strong as those of their young students. When translanguaging took place, the different levels
and strengths of each language in one’s linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge became clear. In
this sense, translanguaging strategies introduced a more student-inquiry driven learning ecology.
This study confirmed that teachers’ translanguaging performance came quite naturally and spon-
taneously, and was not really ‘planned’ beforehand. However, the teachers may not have had the
awareness that their translanguaging practices were exerting positive pedagogical functions in
student learning. Teaching professionals needed explicit knowledge of theories of classroom
language use.

Discussion and conclusion

Taking a holistic and contextualised approach, this study investigated classroom translanguaging
strategies in multilingual foreign language classrooms. The study found that students’ and teachers’
attitudes towards translanguaging and their practices have explicitly demonstrated practical scaffold-
ing techniques that could enhance classroom communication and teacher–student relationships.
Although students spoke several different L1s, they were very active and willing to help the class
and the teacher with their knowledge of a common language. The data indicated that the trans-
languaging in foreign language classrooms has by and large contributed to giving voice to students
for meaning negotiation at different levels. This has all helped to acknowledging students’ input and
the importance of rapport among all classroom participants. The findings from this study, aside from
shedding light on what teachers and students think and do in reality, provided a dynamic case for
translanguaging research.
First and foremost, findings from the three research questions pointed to a need to consider one
major issue: how can foreign language education respond to the increasingly plurilingualist view of
language teaching and learning? There are a few important aspects with which language teacher
education may need to respond to the development of translanguaging theories and practices.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 9

Renew knowledge on language learning. The increasing epistemological and pedagogical impor-
tance of translanguaging has reconfigured traditional conceptions of language, classroom pedago-
gies and student–teacher engagement and interaction. Foreign language teachers will soon be
invited to rethink or even dismiss some long-established yet unproven assumptions in second
language acquisition to develop their teaching and research quality, such as the ‘mother tongue’
(Cook 1999) and ‘codeswitching’ (Lin 2013a). Accommodating translanguaging in foreign language
education requires the reconstitution of teachers’ knowledge of language and language teaching.
This paper argues that explicit teaching can help teachers understand the concept of the trans-
languaging approach (Canagarajah 2011b). Nevertheless, it is anticipated that foreign language
teaching may take a very long time to recognise the theoretical creativity of a multilingual strategy
(Lin 2013b).
Facilitate structured translanguaging strategies. Canagarajah (2011a) pointed out that there is a lack
of explicit taxonomic structures within translanguaging pedagogies, which poses confusions and
challenges for teaching practitioners to put this into real practice. Having prepared a sound theoreti-
cal grounding, future research in translanguaging could focus on investigating the optimal strategies
in foreign language teaching. Such models should provide affordance from concrete theoretical
guidelines and practical teaching and learning techniques (Swain, Kirkpatrick, and Cummins 2010).
The findings of this study underscore the need for practical models of translanguaging in a contex-
tualised classroom, rather than leaving teachers and students to engage in a process of trial and error.
Some teachers may have been practicing translanguaging very often, yet knowing little about this
concept, such as T2 in her class. It is important to give explicit guidance to practitioners, otherwise
their translanguaging pedagogy will remain in a trial and error manner. Only through teachable trans-
languaging strategies can language teachers be enabled to meet the challenges from increasingly
high levels of diversity in multilingual foreign language classrooms in higher education. Having suffi-
cient theoretical guidance and practical training, teachers will be more confident to teach with fewer
struggles and uncertainties.
Develop a transformative teacher–student role. In order to effectively employ modern language
teaching strategies, teachers will be expected to co-teach or to co-learn, as they no longer possess
the sole authority in the classroom. In a nutshell, translanguaging is practised as a co-constructed
strategy to empower, and shakes the monoglossic stereotype of foreign language teaching. It is
impossible for foreign language teachers to know all the languages of students who are increasingly
multilingual, but it is possible for teachers to create a classroom ecology where students’ voices and
inputs are legitimate and valued (García 2011). This would require a different type of teacher,
willing to challenge the hierarchical thinking and ideological boundaries by giving voice to all
available language resources. Language practice is never free from ideological bondage and
nation-state interests after all. Future research could invite more teacher participants to comment
on this point.
Nevertheless, one of the inevitable ramifications of translanguaging strategies is inevitably a new
linguistic hierarchy taking form. It is striking to observe the hegemonic power of English in foreign
language education. Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012) also emphasised the ideological and symbolic
nature of translanguaging by stating that translanguaging provides a conceptualisation that could
invent new ideologies. Situated in an international foreign language teaching setting, this study
has offered some evidence that that one’s ability to translanguage is subject to the size and strength
of one’s linguistic pool. One’s opportunity to translanguage is circumstantial, because there are many
factors in the larger linguistic environment that could shuffle and re-rank the sequence of knowledge
structure within one’s linguistic repertoire. This study then calls for further understanding of trans-
languaging in contextualised foreign language classrooms to refine its practicality.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
10 D. WANG

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