Bilingual Postgraduates' Potentials for Original Research by Translanguaging for Theorising

Abstract

Raising the global awareness and mobilising the originality of postgraduate researchers have been emphasized in the internationalisation of postgraduate education in many countries. However, linguistically and theoretically based academic inequalities are still pervasive, which has marginalised non-native English-speaking researchers and their non-English theoretical knowledge systems. Postgraduate researchers in this context tend to depend on Anglo-American and Eurocentric theories which are mostly in English to do research, undermining their possibilities for original research. Bilingual postgraduate researchers, nevertheless, have great potentials for original theorising using translanguaging if a translanguaging perspective is adopted in postgraduate education. By digging into the Chinese word 理论 (lǐ lùn), the paper explains how bilingual postgraduate researchers may be engaged in bilingual theorising with translanguaging and what such theorising capabilities may value. By activating their entire linguistic-theoretical repertoire in this way, bilingual postgraduate researchers, therefore, are able to devise new conceptual and analytical tools to interpret and explain academic issues.