Translanguaging in a Birmingham Chinese Complementary School: Ideology and Identity

Abstract

Translanguaging practice in contexts of ethnic language education has called more attention from sociolinguistic researchers in the past decade. It has been empirically proved as a ‘basic norm’ of multilingualism in such contexts. This chapter aims to discuss translanguaging practices with data from a linguistic ethnographic (LE) case study on a large Chinese complementary school (CCS) in Birmingham, England. The study investigates multilingual practices of adult participants in and around the school, focusing on the changing constructions of language ideology, Chinese teachers’ professional identities and the ethnic identification of Chineseness. It documents the impact of social mobility and superdiversity on the shifting relations among Chinese language varieties and English within and around the CCS. A 10-month-fieldwork for the study was conducted in 2013–14 academic year, with audio-recorded and noted observations and interviews as dominant methods for data collection. Findings show that (1) translanguaging is preferably chosen by a group of Chinese Putonghua (Mandarin) teachers as a pedagogy to construct and negotiate a flexible English-Chinese bilingualism related to the ideology of ‘language as profit’; (2) these teachers dynamically draw linguistic resources from English and Mandarin and other semiotic signs (e.g. body languages, images, tones, etc.) to perform professional identities in terms of professionality and transnational flexibility; (3) translanguaging practices on a school board meeting reveal new local discourses of Chineseness orientating to a ‘new Chinese voice’. In conclusion, a CCS is by nature a translanguaging space where multilingual Chinese migrants creatively use various communicative resources to generate, negotiate and reconcile certain preferable ideologies and identities.