Multilingualism in Education: why do multilingual teachers translanguage in the English learning classroom?

In this research, I address the pedagogical functions of translanguaging in classrooms. There are four themes to categorise the functions, namely translanguaging for understanding the unknown field, translanguaging for interpersonal interaction, translanguaging for language instructions, and finally, translanguaging as discourse markers.

The analysis found the following themes relating to why teachers translanguage, for understanding unknown knowledge, for interpersonal interaction, for language instruction and as discourse markers. The analysis of interview data reveals that teachers have limited awareness of the pedagogical contributions of translanguaging. Teachers hold a passive attitude towards using Putonghua in the classroom, but implicitly took advantage of translanguaging.

The findings can be applied to develop teacher education in order to keep teachers' teaching theory updated. The result of the present research has confirmed the pedagogical value of translanguaging. The findings have important implications for developing teacher education to raise teachers' multilingual awareness. Secondly, the pedagogical functions of translanguaging should be introduced clearly to teachers. To be specific, while translanguaging to enhance comprehension, teachers are also supposed to give extra information, such as background knowledge or contextualisation. Teachers are also supposed to use translanguaging to create a communicative language learning classroom. Finally, teachers are encouraged to freely translanguage in language instruction and indicating discourse markers.