Translingual practices in English-Medium Instruction (EMI) classrooms are increasingly gaining momentum and receiving research attention (Smit, 2019; Yuan & Yang, 2020; Drljača-Margić & Molino, 2022). Spontaneous translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) happens to be a meaning-making strategy that lecturers and students are unaware of. Translanguaging entails the use of the speakers' entire linguistic repertoire to construct discourse (Lin & He, 2017). The use of these translingual strategies in EMI contexts may turn out to be a chief paradigm for stakeholders' multilingual awareness. For this reason, educational communities should cater to the use of the linguistic repertoires of both students and lecturers.
The focus of the present study is to explore how EMI lecturers express their communicative intentions by making use of their full linguistic repertoire. For this purpose, we draw on the EMIVIP corpus, which is part of the LOL (Live Online Lectures) (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja) (Querol-Julián, 2021). EMIVIP corpus consists of face-to-face and online EMI lectures delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic at two Spanish universities. In this study, we selected six live online sessions imparted by two EMI lecturers (three each) from the field of Technology Science. Adopting a corpus-driven approach, we carried out an interactive discourse analysis supported by the annotation tool ELAN to determine the discourse functions expressed in the translingual episodes.
Findings show how translingual practices are used through the named languages, i.e., English and Spanish, within the episodes of interaction. These discourse functions show the use of spontaneous translanguaging to fulfill communicative intentions (e.g., scaffold vocabulary, paraphrase). In addition, the use of translingual practices serves to afford the meaning-making process (Lin, 2019), fostering epistemic justice (Lemke & Lin, 2022). Finally, some pedagogical implications for EMI professional development to enhance translingual practices are provided.
References
Drljača Margić, B., & Molino, A. (2022). Translanguaging in EMI. RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista Di Lingue E Letterature Straniere E Culture Moderne, 9(17), 29-47. https://doi.org/10.13135/2384-8987/6670
García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lemke, J.L., & Lin, A. M. Y. (2022). Translanguaging and flows: Towards an alternative conceptual model. Educational Linguistics, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1515/eduling-2022-0001
Lin, A.M. (2019). Theories of trans/languaging and trans-semiotizing: implications for content-based education classrooms. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 22(1), 5-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1515175
Lin, A.M., & He, P. (2017). Translanguaging as dynamic activity flows in CLIL classrooms. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 16(4), 228-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2017.1328283
Querol-Julián, M. (2021) "Annotating multimodal interaction in a corpus of live online lectures". International Corpus Linguistics Conference. Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick (Ireland).
Smit, U. (2019). Classroom discourse in EMI. On the dynamics of multilingual practices. In K. Murata (Ed.), English-medium instruction from an English as a lingua franca perspective, (pp. 99-122). Routledge.
Yuan, R., & Yang, M. (2020). Towards an understanding of translanguaging in EMI teacher education classrooms. Language Teaching Research, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820964123
