With a growing popularity of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in tertiary education,an increasing number of teachers of languages other than English (LOTEs) involved in CLIL lessons are confronted with new problems, such as lack of content knowledge, ready-made teaching materials in LOTEs, or guidelines on how to integrate language and content, limited time for preparing, and students' limited language proficiency. Thus, it remains a huge challenge for LOTEs teachers, especially novice teachers, to prepare and design the content and language integrated courses.
While translanguaging has been regarded as an appropriate approach to addressing the challenge that teachers and learners experienced during the CLIL classrooms (Lin & He, 2017), limited studies have been done concerning translanguaging practices applied in content and third language integrated research in LOTEs classrooms (Nikula & Moore, 2019). The majority of existing studies focused on the positive roles of translanguaging practices on CLIL classrooms such as meaning-making (Bieri,2018), content scaffolding, highlighting topic shifts, facilitating transitions between different stages in the lesson (Lin, 2015), promoting social involvement and identity affirmation (Lin & He, 2017). However, the concept of translanguaging has not yet been discussed on the preparing phase of content and third language integrated learning courses, which could empower LOTEs teachers, especially novice CLIL teachers in classroom practice.
To address aforementioned gaps, this study aims to explore teachers' translanguaging practices when teaching subject content, especially at the preparation stages for the CLIL courses in the medium of languages other than English (LOTEs) in a Chinese tertiary institution. The paper intends to answer the following two questions:
Q1: What are teachers' translanguaging practices during the preparation of the CLIL courses using French as a major medium of instruction in a Chinese university?
Q2: What are teachers' perceptions on the use of translanguaging in CLIL course-preparing contexts?
A variety of data were collected to investigate these practices.The data include teachers' course planning and designing documents, teaching materials andteacher's reflective diaries.Through a thematic analyse of data, this research not only identified multiple functions of L1 and L2 in the designing of content and third language integrated learning courses, but also showed how translanguging strategies could be used to facilitate both language and content instruction. The findings could inform LOTEs teachers involved in CLIL classrooms of translanguaging pedagogies and enrich the theoretical framework of translanguaging.
Reference
Bieri, A. (2018). Translanguaging practices in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons in Switzerland. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 5(2), 91–109.
Lin, A.M.Y.(2015).Conceptualising the potential role of L1 in CLIL, Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28:1, 74-89
Lin, A.M.Y.& He, P.(2017).Translanguaging as Dynamic Activity Flows in CLIL Classrooms, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 16:4, 228-244
Nikula, T. & Moore, P.(2019). Exploring translanguaging in CLIL, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22:2, 237-249
