Translanguaging pedagogies in developing morphological awareness: the case of Japanese students learning Chinese in China

Abstract This mixed-methods study explored the development of morphological awareness in learning Chinese as a third language, focusing on how the activation of a learner’s multilingual repertoire can influence morphological awareness. The study was conducted for a period of eight weeks with 62 Japanese students in a Chinese learning program at a university in China. The students are native Japanese speakers with English and Chinese as their second and third languages. The students were allocated into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received translanguaging instruction, while the control group completed learning through the monolingual approach for which the language of instruction was Chinese. The main aim of the translanguaging intervention was to help students utilize their multilinguistic repertoire across languages for their morphology learning. The results revealed that morphology learning scores were higher for the participants in the experimental group than the control group. The focus group interviews revealed that the students in the experimental group favorably perceived the use of translanguaging strategies for morphology learning. Moreover, the students in the experimental group reported cognitive, interactive, and affective benefits from translanguaging pedagogy. Finally, this paper presents relevant implications for the use of translanguaging pedagogy for teaching morphology.