Multilingualism and translanguaging in the teaching of and through English: Rethinking linguistic boundaries in an Australian University

This chapter offers a contextual background to the teaching of English as an Additional Language (EAL) in Australian universities. The discussion then turns towards the efficacy of conventional approaches to languages in education in the context of current diversities, and the role that code-switching and translanguaging may play in teaching English in Asian and Australian contexts. Whereas there has been a recent interest in the potential of translanguaging as a pedagogical approach (e.g. Canagarajah 2011; García and Li Wei 2014), there has been little documentary evidence of a systematic approach to two-way translanguaging (Chinese to English, and English to Chinese) in written assessment tasks in university courses. Here we report on a micro-study in which there has been a systematic pedagogical shift in the teaching EAL for the purposes of preparing students to use English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at an Australian university. In this study, an approach that builds on each student’s bilingualism or multilingualism through practices of translanguaging is documented. We report on diagnostic coding and analysis of written assignments of students whose primary language is Chinese. We find a strong correlation between students’ written proficiency in Chinese and in English. We also find a strong correlation of students’ metalinguistic expertise in translation and their proficiency in their home language. We argue that the findings indicate value in shifting from a single objective to teach only English to the development of high level academic proficiency in both the primary language and English.