A multimodal analysis of the online translanguaging practices of international students studying Chinese in a Chinese university

Abstract Previous research has recognised the value of translanguaging in Chinese language teaching but has focused primarily on using English as the medium of instruction. However, teachers and students may not share a common language with which to communicate in a multilingual class, which is a significant challenge in Chinese learning and teaching. This study incorporates translanguaging into the pedagogical design by implementing a translanguaging-based task, perceiving Chinese learners as creative agents orchestrating numerous semiotic resources in meaning-making. The participants were a cohort of beginner-level Chinese learners with diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds taking an online Chinese course at a Chinese university. Data sources included the participants’ video-recorded oral presentations and their reflective journals. Drawing on social semiotic theory, analysis of the video recordings shows that the learners moved creatively between modalities (written and spoken, visual and auditory, gesture and drawing) that worked together as an assemblage to make meaning beyond their linguistic capacity while ensuring audience comprehension. The reflective journals, however, reveal ambivalent attitudes: using multilingual resources eased concerns about the audience’s reception of the participants’ meaning-making, but also generated guilt among the participants. Based on these findings, this study argues for the transformative power of translanguaging-based pedagogy and highlights the communicative affordance of semiotic resources including cultural artefacts and knowledge. The pedagogical implications of designing translanguaging-based tasks in the teaching of Chinese and other Asian languages are discussed.