Leveraging mutually shared knowledge through translanguaging in EMI classrooms: combining multimodal conversation analysis with interpretative phenomenological analysis

Abstract

Recent research has examined how teachers utilize translanguaging to tap into students' out-of-school knowledge and students' prior learnt content knowledge to scaffold students' learning of new content knowledge. This study addresses a research gap by examining how teachers can maximize the utilization of mutually shared knowledge, which is not accessible to individuals outside the classroom community, through translanguaging to consolidate students' content learning. The data is derived from a larger project conducted in Hong Kong secondary English-Medium-Instruction mathematics classrooms. Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) is employed to analyse classroom interactions, triangulated by video-stimulated-recall interviews analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). I argue that establishing a translanguaging space allows teachers to capitalize on the shared sociocultural knowledge intrinsic to classroom communities, which shapes content instruction and forges meaningful relationships with students. I also highlight the significance of combining MCA with IPA to gain a deeper understanding of specific translanguaging moments and the reasoning behind incorporating mutually shared sociocultural knowledge into classroom interactions, which cannot be attained solely through the description of interactional sequences.