Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Thesis
Terms of Use
© 2023 Huayu Liu. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Linguistics Department
Abstract
Classroom translanguaging has recently gained popularity in ESL and foreign language classrooms, where students come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. In a nutshell, translanguaging researchers highlight an individual’s linguistic repertoire, which goes beyond the boundaries of named languages and focuses on all language elements that an individual knows. As a pedagogy, translanguaging advocates linguistic equity because it encourages students to access their linguistic repertoire, which is not limited to the target language in the classroom. Yet, the viability of this approach in the classroom is unclear, and its distinction from code-switching can also be ambiguous. Therefore, this thesis studies this issue further by utilizing data from interviews with Mandarin and Japanese language professors in a higher-education setting. Through accessing multilingual moments in the classroom and the professors’ understanding and attitudes toward translanguaging, this thesis finds that the translanguaging classroom is an impossible ideal in a higher education foreign language classroom context. And the limitation can be caused by institutional expectations, language hierarchies in the context, and the question of boundaries between named languages.
Recommended Citation
Liu, Huayu , '23, "Translanguaging or Code-switching?: A Case Study of Multilingual Activities in college-level Mandarin and Japanese Classrooms" (2023). Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards. 312.
https://works.swarthmore.edu/theses/312