A Study On Translanguaging Of Ethnic Chinese In Scotland

Translanguaging is a new lens and topic in the field of Applied Linguistics and Language Education.This thesis focuses on ethnic Chinese who are also learners of Chinese from Chinese community school in Scotland.The purpose of this research is to analyse the use of translanguaging in Scotland’s Chinese community school and to study the advantages and disadvantages from learners’ point of view.Considering there are many translanguaging practices occurring in Scotland’s community school,it is worth paying more attention to languaging practices of bilinguals in Scotland’s Chinese community school.The Holistic Approach will be used to recruit interviewees who are from the same class with the same level of Chinese.The research conducted with the method of video/audio interview that contains two parts.Apart from that,Thematic Analysis is applied to analyse the functions,advantages and disadvantages of translanguaging.The results indicate that firstly,translanguaging have phatic function,emotive function,metalingual function and referential function.Secondly,translanguaging have the advantages of scaffolding expression,upgrading bilingual capacity and making communication more effective.Finally,translanguaging stills needs some improvements,which means that translanguaging have the disadvantages of making misunderstandings,reducing communicating effectiveness in multi context and reducing learning motivation.Considering from ethnic Chinese bilinguals’ perspective,this thesis studied language learners’ attitude towards translanguaging to fill the gap in the field of Chinese teaching.