(Early childhood and elementary education, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)

Abstract: Hong Kong is a predominantly Chinese speaking community but has a multilingual and multicultural environment, and developing an appropriate curriculum and effective teaching strategies for non-Chinese speaking (NCS) children is a pressing issue in Hong Kong education.

Translanguaging become a hotly discussed topic in the field of bi/multilingual education in recent years, and has been adopted by many frontline teachers as one of the pedagogical approaches in multilingual classrooms, particularly for teaching students who speak non-mainstream languages. However, it has been studied insufficiently in the context of Chinese as a second language, where it is practiced to facilitate knowledge co-constructed by Chinese teachers and non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students.

This study uses theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded evidence to investigate the practices of Translanguaging in learning Chinese as a second language. The research was conducted by the researcher who was also the class teacher and participant in the research, which makes the data collection were not only feasible and convenient, but also more authentic and in-depth. The processes and patterning of translanguaging are examined in a multilingual context. Classroom interaction data were collected to analyze the processes of meaning making among non-Chinese speaking (NCS) children and their teachers in a Hong Kong kindergarten.

The participants comprised 20 NCS learners in their third year (K3) in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The student focus group came from Nepal, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Data included interviews, field notes and classroom interaction videos in the kindergarten. Discourse analysis on classroom data shows that translanguaging emerge in the dynamic of meaning making. This study looks critically at the traditional concept of the monolingual language classroom and explores the translanguaging practices in complementary multilingual kindergarten classrooms for NCS children learning Chinese characters in Hong Kong. Both the pedagogical and theoretical implications for teaching Chinese characters using translanguaging are discussed.

Key words: translanguaging, teaching Chinese as a second language, picturebook, embodied teaching, ethnic minority, multilingual education