Translanguaging flows in Chinese word instruction: Potential critical sociolinguistic engagement with children’s artistic representations of Chinese characters

Abstract

ABSTRACT Translanguaging (TL) theory underscores individuals’ agentive deployment of all semiotic resources to construct meaning, highlighting language as part of an integrated repertoire for communication. To explore the potential of pedagogical TL in Chinese vocabulary instruction, this paper focused on one Chinese Language Arts lesson from a larger study on TL pedagogies in a multiethnic Grade 3 Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education classroom in a U.S. public school. The teacher in this lesson provided an explicit instruction on word origins andknowledge and then students were encouraged to use their imagination to create visual narratives of different Chinese characters based on their orthography and semantics. We performed a fine-grained analysis of the teacher’s instructional practice and a multimodal analysis of children’s Chinese character art as a visual narrative. We found that the teacher engaged in TL practices, mobilizing a range of multimodal, multilingual and multisensory resources to facilitate the co-construction of meaning with students. We also saw that the students’ word art design – the crossing between linguistic and visual signs – index their funds of knowledge and sociocultural values, which could potentially open up spaces for more critical discussions on the complex intersections of language, culture and beliefs.