A Translanguaging Perspective on Teacher Contingency in Hong Kong English Medium Instruction History Classrooms

Link to the Zoom meeting: https://hkbu.zoom.us/j/91380275624

Meeting ID: 913 8027 5624

A growing number of studies have explored the ways how teachers contingently respond to students’ unexpected responses or a lack of student responses in second language classrooms. From a sociocultural perspective, teacher contingency involves a departure from the lesson plan in local response to the unexpected or unforeseeable actions in the classroom interactions (van Lier, 2001). This study adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective in order to examine how a teacher employs various resources to contingently respond to students’ initiatives and reformulate his utterances in order to prompt student participation. The data are based on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong English-Medium-Instruction secondary history classroom. This paper reconceptualizes the notion of teacher contingency and argues that the process of how the teacher contingently responds to the unexpected outcomes that arise in real-time interactions is a process of translanguaging. Such a process requires the teacher in orchestrating the available linguistic and multimodal resources to construct pedagogical actions on the spot, instead of being planned in advance.

Kevin W. H. Tai is Assistant Professor of English Language Education at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong and Honorary Research Fellow at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society in University College London (UCL). Additionally, he is Associate Editor of The Language Learning Journal (ESCI-listed Journal; Routledge), Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (SSCI-listed Journal; Routledge) and Managing Guest Editor of Learning and Instruction(SSCI-listed Journal; Elsevier). Professor Kevin Tai has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCL and his doctoral research was fully funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). His research interests include language education policy, classroom discourse, translanguaging in multilingual contexts and qualitative research methods (particularly Multimodal Conversation Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Linguistic Ethnography). Professor Kevin Tai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).