Translanguaging in a Chinese–English bilingual education programme: a university-classroom ethnography

ABSTRACT

Since 2001, Chinese–English bilingual education has been officially promoted in many universities in mainland China. It has, however, recently been criticised for not only failing to improve students’ English proficiency, but also impeding subject knowledge learning. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through classroom observations, interviews and fieldwork notes, this study examines the practices of bilingual education in an undergraduate Business Management Programme in one university. The study reveals that translanguaging is a prominent phenomenon in almost all subject courses in the programme. The translanguaging practices can be largely grouped into four categories: bilingual label quest, simultaneous code-mixing, cross-language recapping, and dual-language substantiation. The study further identifies supportiveness and freedom of context as two major forces that spurred the practices of translanguaging in the programme. The study concludes by arguing that an ideological reorientation towards flexible bilingualism is emerging in such BE contexts, which might be a favourable move away from the monolingual stereotype manifested in the traditional teaching-English-as-a-foreign-language and content-subject courses that envision English-medium instruction. A translanguaging perspective might give the current practices of BE due recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• bilingual education
• EMI
• Chinese universities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Weihong Wang is an associate professor in applied linguistics at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, P. R. China. She received her PhD at The University of Hong Kong and MA at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include bilingual education, academic literacies, second language writing and English Language Teaching. Her publications can be seen in Language, Culture and Curriculum, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, System, The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher and Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics.

Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen is Professor in language and education at the Department of Education, University of Bath, UK. She has published widely in the field of applied linguistics. Her recent books include: Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities (by John Benjamins); and Language, Ideology and Education: The Politics of Textbooks in Language Education (with Csilla Weninger, published by Routledge). Her other publications have appeared in Language Policy; International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education; Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development; Language and Education; etc.

ORCID

Weihong Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0594-4532

Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8973-5251

Notes

1. The distinction of the four translanguaging categories is not that clear-cut. We group the translanguaging practices in our data into different categories according to the most prominent feature each instance reveals. But at the same time we admit that there are overlappings.

2. All interviews of administrators, teachers and students were conducted in Chinese. To save place, only English translations are provided in the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The project was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), Hubei, PRC.