The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

395 / 2020-01-21 09:46:44

The role that translanguaging plays in bilingual children’s narrative competence

translanguaging, bilingual children, narrative competence

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism > Multilingualism and Multiculturalism

The advent of superdiverse settings in the 21st century has increasingly required classroom practices, curricula and policies to build on multiple repertoires of the learners and to acknowledge the linguistic fluidities that overlap into one another (e.g., Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Wei, 2011). However, not many studies focus on how bilingual children share their life experience through translanguaging (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015). For bilinguals by their very nature, it is a way of being in the world and making sense of the world. This case study will focus on several Chinese EFL children’s expressing of learning experience in Windsor for one academic year, by collecting data through the observation, field notes and interview and analyzing data by grounded theory. The foci lie in the role of translanguaging that plays in bilingual children’s narrative ability and how that improves or impedes with their sharing of learning experience. The conceptual framework insists of translanguaging, bilingualism and narrative competence. The findings are expected to reveal how these young learners as bilinguals make sense of the world and construct knowledge in the process of sharing life experience and turing to translanguaging as a useful tool. This will shed light on the instruction in classroom by integrating students’ lived experience into learning content. In that way, students’ voice get heard and they feel more respect.