This case study describes how students’ translanguaging merges as index of becoming communicative in intercultural group interaction in a global education program. With the data collected ethnographically, the study will suggest that translanguaging is competence for students to contribute to their academic community.
This case study describes how students’ translanguaging (e.g., García and Li Wei, 2014) emerges as index of becoming communicative in intercultural group interaction in a global education program offered by a Japanese private university. As globalization proceeds, Japanese universities have offered education programs which encourage students to become globally-minded as well as to acquire English language and intercultural communication skills. The data were gathered as a part of the author’s ethnographic fieldwork over a period of one semester in an English-medium class (Present author, 2018). The interactions from the target group were recorded in the class. The group consisted of one American TA (an undergraduate exchange student from the US), one Japanese student (an undergraduate student from the university where the study was conducted), one Thai exchange student, and one Indonesian exchange student. The data for this presentation also include those from public documents, interviews, as well as recorded group interactions. In the group, the participants used English and Japanese as their common linguistic repertoire to perform. Two aspects of the data point to translanguaging as an index of becoming communicative: 1) translanguaging is one of communicative competencies necessary for globally-minded learners to contribute to the multinational group activities. In the group interaction, participants become locally-minded and have to use their common linguistic repertoire, not limited to English, to construct the group knowledge; 2) in the era of globalization, it is pedagogically challenging for learners to use not only a major global language (English) but also to draw locally from their existing linguistic repertoires to successfully complete tasks in so-called global contexts. References García, O., & Li Wei. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. New York: Palgrave. Macmillan.Present author. (2018). Academic and foreign language socialization in a multicultural classroom: A linguistic ethnographic study. A dissertation submitted to K University.
