A Case Study Of Teachers’ Translanguaging Practices In Senior One English Reading Classes

With the popularity of “English-immersion” program,“English-only classroom teaching” in the classroom is highly recommended in many countries and the use of the L1 is controversial.As a matter of fact,it is still quite common to use Chinese in English classrooms in China.In the past,the language use in classes has been researched as code-switching and not translanguaging.As a new theory derived in western country,translanguaging is widely used to study the language use of students and teachers in learning.In China,the research on translanguaging is still in its infancy,and there is a lot of room for exploration(Yuan & Zhou,2015).This study is a case study in nature and intends to investigate senior high school teachers’ language use in reading classes as well as the functions and reasons of such translanguaging practices.The data in this study is collected mainly by nine classroom audio-recordings from three teachers’ classes,the author’s field notes,and the interviews with the teachers and students.The audio recordings are used to record the teachers’ complete language use in reading classes.They are transcribed into context and then classified into different categorization by the author.Scenes containing translanguaging practices have been deeply described and analyzed later.The field notes mainly aim at writing down the translanguaging practices where the author is confused about,and it would be a part of the interviews.What’s more,interviews with the teachers and students are conducted to check the author’s analysis and interpretation of the teacher’s specific language practices.The study reveals that 1)there are translanguaging practices in English reading classes,teachers indeed use Chinese in English reading classrooms frequently.In detail,10683 numbers of Chinese are used in the observed reading classes,and the English words are 12793.2)Compared with previous studies,teacher’s translanguaging displays more abundant patterns and these patterns appear in different frequency and for different purposes.The six patterns include “E + C;C + E;E +C +E;C + E + C;C + E + C +E;E+ C + E + C”.Among them,“E + C” and “E +C + E”are the most frequent and are used to each and explain vocabulary.While the most complicated “C + E + C +E” and “E+ C + E + C” are used for explaining grammar and long difficult sentences.3)From the perspective of function,teachers would translanguage(1)for constructing and transmitting knowledge;(2)for classroom management’(3)for expressing ideas;(4)for asking questions;(5)for giving tasks and assignments;(6)translanguaging combining different functions.Among the six types of functions,most translanguaging practices serve for asking questions and constructing and transmitting knowledge,and the least frequent translanguaging practices serve for classroom management.The findings may help re-evaluate the “English-only instruction” policy in EFL classrooms and the role of mother language in English teaching and learning from a new perspective.And it provides teachers the guidance for language choice and use in English classes so as to achieve more effective performance.