Paper Presentation Learners' perception of translanguaging: a case study of teaching English Debate in college more

Sat, Dec 4, 13:30-14:00 Asia/Taipei

This talk aims to share learners' perception of how translanguaging (Garcia and Li 2014, Backer 2017, Li 2018) improves English majors’ process of constructing knowledge of local issues, while strengthening students’ global communication ability. As many EMI courses target to speak English for instructors in class, the translanguaging focuses on incorporating native and foreign languages in class for both instructors and learners. Backer (2017) has discussed the advantages of translanguaging to help learners obtain deeper understanding of the subject matter, develop the weaker language, facilitate co-operation, and integrate fluent speakers with early learners. To show how to achieve the goal of constructing knowledge and strengthening communication ability through translanguaging, this current talk focuses the preliminary practices of teaching English Debate to English majors in a private university in Taipei in Spring 2020 and 2021. The course objective is to introduce students to the techniques of debate in English, and students follows the steps: issue identification, data collection and analyses, opinion formation, speech organization and practice and final presentation. Through translanguaging, students are initially allowed to discuss in Chinese and collect Chinese/English data. Later, English is partially incorporated when students form their opinions and organize their speech. Finally, practice and final presentation are conducted in English only. The students’ feedback suggests that translanguaging gradually helps them achieve goals in the steps and improve their fluency in their English presentation. For example, one of the students' feedback from the Spring 2020 class suggested that "the instructor allowed us to speak and read Chinese, and this helped me learn faster. I can speak English more confidently." Another student's feedback from the Spring 2021 class revealed that the practice in Chinese helped him/her efficiently learn relevant information by reading Chinese materials, and therefore he/she can organize his/her English debate with the constructed knowledge. In general, students' from the two classes show the consensus that translanguaging bolsters their confidence in completing each English debate.