Chinese Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Translanguaging and Its Uses in Portuguese Foreign Language Classrooms
Chinese Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Translanguaging and Its Uses in Portuguese Foreign Language Classrooms

Summary/Abstract: Recent research has shown that L1 use can serve important cognitive, communicative, and social functions in communicative foreign and second language learning (Turnbull & Dailey-O’Cain, 2009). In the context of Chinese universities, Meij and Zhao (2010) argue that there is widespread agreement among administrators that L1 should not be used in L2 classrooms and that both teachers and students should follow this norm. However, in their study, they found that translanguaging practice is perceived by teachers and students as a useful approach to achieve desired learning outcomes. Other studies (Cai & Cook, 2015; Littlewood & Fang, 2011) have shown that teachers use L1 in L2 class for specific functions: addressing personal needs, giving direction in class, managing class, and ensuring student understanding. The aim of this paper is to present a study of university teachers’ attitudes towards and uses of translanguaging in Portuguese as foreign language classrooms. The participants were 31 Chinese teachers, all native speakers of Mandarin in mainland China. They answered a questionnaire to collect information related to the importance that teachers assign to different uses of translanguaging. Findings indicate that the majority of the teachers believe that the use of the students’ L1 by the teacher or students could improve Portuguese learning in various ways, especially in the first levels.

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