Despite the widespread use of mobile digital devices such as iPads in teaching and learning, there is little research on the ways in which content teachers make use of the technological affordances of the iPad to achieve pedagogical goals in bilingual/multilingual classrooms. This article adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective to explore how the use of the iPad extends the semiotic and spatial repertoires for enabling the English Medium Instruction (EMI) teacher to create a translanguaging space for supporting multilingual students’ learning of new academic knowledge. The data for this article is based on a linguistic ethnographic project in an EMI mathematics classroom in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is used to analyse the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The article argues that the iPad provides opportunities for the EMI teacher to fully exploit the semiotic and spatial resources for creating a technology-mediated space in the classroom. Such a space in turn allows the teacher to accomplish content teaching and build a more engaging environment for learning.
Although a large number of varieties of English in Asia have gained recognition as independent varieties, this has not been the case for Hong Kong English (HKE) (Jenkins, 2015: 162). The city has a low level of affiliation towards HKE (Jenkins, 2015: 167) and often laments its ever-falling standard of English (Leung, 2015). There exists a phenomenon of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ – the community may recognise that a local variety of English exists and conform to its features in practice, but it still looks to native varieties as the norm and views local features as evidence of deteriorating language standards (Kachru, 1983: 118).
Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent.
The affordances of iPad for constructing a technology-mediated space in Hong Kong English medium instruction secondary classrooms: A translanguaging view
