Translanguaging Performances in a CLIL Classroom at a Japanese University

Abstract

After García and Li Wei’s (Translanguaging. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) seminal work, the phenomenon of translanguaging, which is a multilingual practice of plurilingual individuals as integrated linguistic repertoire, has been investigated by a number of researchers, and the theory has been (re)conceptualised in the field of bi/multilingual education. Lin, Wu, and Lemke (forthcoming) recently coined the term translanguaging performances to describe the nature of structuring of translanguaging. This study focuses on the use of translanguaging in a group discussion in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom at a Japanese university, where Japanese students and one Saudi student talked both in Japanese and in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The focus is placed on the structure of the participants’ translanguaging (the function and the process), particularly where ELF emerges in the context. In the 40-minute discussion, the participants spoke in Japanese most of the time, and ELF was used for less than 10 minutes in total, especially between a Japanese and an Arabic speaker. Based on Gumperz (Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Klimpfinger (‘Mind you, sometimes you have to mix’? The role of code-switching in English as a Lingua Franca. Vienna English Working Papers, 16(2), 36–61, 2007), four functions of translanguaging were identified: (1) addressee specification, (2) assertion, (3) clarification and (4) appealing for linguistic assistance. The process of translanguaging was also examined in relation to turn-taking structure, the results showing that the use of response tokens in ELF and metalinguistic comments seem to function as cues for translanguaging. By so doing, the participants exercise their translanguaging performances, simultaneously co-constructing a translanguaging space in the discussion.

Appendix: Annotation Conventions

Conventions	Symbol	Explanation
Extralinguistic information	<$E>… </$E>	This includes laughter, coughs and transcribers’ comments.
Unintelligible Speech	<$G?>	Unintelligible speech is marked with these brackets.
Guess	<$H>… </$H>	Where the accuracy of the transcription is uncertain, the sequence of words in question is placed between these two angle brackets.
Overlap	<$O1>… </$O1>	Some parts of the corpus have been coded for overlapping speech. For this purpose, the overlap is indicated by numbered angle brackets.
Interrupted sentence	+	When an utterance is interrupted by another speaker, this is indicated by using a + sign at the end of interrupted utterance and at the point where the speaker resumes his or her utterance.
Unfinished sentence	=	Unfinished sentences of any type are indicated with = sign at the end of unfinished utterances.

1. Adolphs (2008, pp. 137–138)