This study examines a Chinese bilingual community teacher's translanguaging pedagogy in an Asian American history classroom within a community-based Chinese heritage school. Drawing on four months of classroom observations, artifacts, and interviews collected as part of a larger critical ethnographic study, this article explores the teacher's ideological shift and purposeful design of translanguaging pedagogy as she navigates the dual goals of heritage language maintenance and teaching Asian American history with Chinese American bilingual children. Through continuous reflection, the teacher developed a translanguaging stance and enacted translanguaging as a loving pedagogy that empowered her Chinese American bilingual students to draw on their full linguistic and cultural repertoires and community knowledge to engage with the immigration, transnational, and racialized experiences of the Chinese American community. This study offers implications for practitioners seeking to approach translanguaging as a pedagogy that supports both bilingual development and content learning, as well as for researchers focused on teacher education in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.
Translanguaging has been well-documented in language learning environments and L2-medium content instruction (e.g. EMI), but rarely examined in L1-medium disciplinary settings. To address this gap, this study is set in a Mandarin-medium undergraduate journalism classroom in China, using 14 h of video-recorded lessons from an intact cohort of 28 first-year students and their instructor, supplemented by video-stimulated recall interviews with a five-student focus group and the instructor separately. By combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), this study scrutinises how translanguaging is enacted through moment-by-moment interaction in a Chinese-medium journalism classroom, and how the teacher and students perceive such translanguaging experience. The MCA findings reveal journalism as a translanguaging-intensive discipline with translanguaging arising organically as an interaction-driven meaning-making strategy during classroom teaching. The IPA accounts show that these translanguaging practices are treated as legitimate resources for accessing global journalistic concepts through their partial English competence, other-language interests and shared cultural resources. Translanguaging in this context functions as disciplinary discourse mediation rather than merely an alternative instructional medium. This reframing yields practical insights into mobilising multilingual resources in L1 settings, while positioning translanguaging as an integrated semiotic practice beyond EMI and language-focused paradigms.
China is a multilingual nation and the current education policy allows minority languages to be used in schooling alongside Mandarin and English in minority regions. Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture implements trilingual education through two models. Model One schools prioritise the Yi language as the primary medium of instruction, whereas Model Two schools rely predominantly on Mandarin. This qualitative case study examines how Yi, Mandarin, and English are used in classroom instruction and informal school spaces in two junior middle schools. Drawing on observations, interviews, and documents, the analysis interprets how practices align with policy along a translanguaging continuum from separation to integration. Across both schools, subject teaching clustered at the separation and translation end. Mandarin served as the default language for explanation and task guidance, Yi was recruited mainly for terminology and literacy, and English was largely confined to grammar translation routines. Integration was common in informal talk across Yi, Sichuanese, and Mandarin but appeared only rarely in instruction. These patterns diverge from trilingual policy intentions and help to explain limited student investment in written Yi. The paper identifies adjustments to assessment, materials, staffing, and classroom design to support planned integration and narrow the gap between practice and policy.
