Designing a modern language course for culturally and linguistically diverse students

Abstract

Cultivating learners’ multimodal communication skills and their intercultural awareness is necessary for effective collaboration. With this aim, a translanguaging dual language (TDL) course was developed at a Japanese multilingual university drawing on the pedagogy of multiliteracies (PoM) and translanguaging. The research questions this study addressed were: (1) What kinds of teaching and learning activities can be provided to allow students to negotiate and co-create knowledge? (2) How do students in a tertiary TDL course engage with the PoM? In the course, role-play videos were made by students to demonstrate approaches to communication with their classmates from various backgrounds. A multimodal textual analysis of the video data was conducted. The findings suggest that the course fostered students’ capability of engaging and negotiating locally situated communication strategies using various semiotic resources including translanguaging. This article also suggests pedagogical implications for student-oriented classrooms that allow space for students’ negotiation and co-construction of knowledge.