With the Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) approach burgeoning worldwide (Coyle et al., 2010), translanguaging has been proposed as an important scaffolding strategy for CLIL (Author, 2016). However, descriptions of such practices in the literature appear too general (e.g. using L1 to explain difficult concepts) to offer specific pedagogical strategies for CLIL practitioners (e.g. Lo, 2015; Nikula & Moore, 2019). To contribute to this topic, this study adopts a dialogic and dynamic process view of human meaning-making (Bakhtin, 1981; Lemke, 2016; Li, 2018; Thibault, 2011) and the thematic pattern perspective (i.e., patterns of thematic items and their semantic relationships constitute the thematic content of a particular content area) (Lemke, 1990) to delineate the translanguaging/trans-semiotizing (Author, 2015a) practices of an experienced science teacher trying out a CLIL approach (Author, 2015b) in a Grade 10 biology class in Hong Kong. Data include lesson videotapes, researcher field notes and post-lesson survey and interviews with the teacher and the students, which indicate that such practices generate positive impact on student learning. Through fine-grained multimodal classroom discourse analysis (Heap, 1985; Kress et al., 2001), the study reveals two important characteristics of the teacher’s practices leading to positive impact on students: First, the teacher’s translanguaging/trans-semiotizing practices create a continuous flow of interanimation (Bakhtin, 1981) between students’ everyday semiotic and cultural patterns and the school-defined semiotic and cultural patterns such that the former is not just a (temporary) scaffold for learning the latter, but the two interweave together to expand students’ communicative and cultural repertoires continuously. Second, the teacher’s translanguaging/trans-semiotizing practices play indispensable roles in co-constructing the target thematic patterns with the students and thus enable the students to integrate content and language in learning. Implications of the study for furthering the theorization and practices of CLIL pedagogies and translanguaging/trans-semiotizing will be discussed.
