Empowering local bilingual teachers through extending the pedagogy of multiliteracies in Taiwan’s primary education

Abstract

In 2018, Taiwan announced a bilingual education policy. Since then, bilingual teacher development has been a national priority, which has created anxiety and concerns among local Taiwanese teachers, who are expected to teach in the English medium. By extending the core values, design principles and inspired practices from New London Group’s (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies (PoM), we present how a local Taiwanese teacher in a Grade 1 content and language integrated learning mathematics class successfully leveraged translingual and trans-semiotic resources in an English-as-a-foreign-language context, which in turn facilitated learners’ multilingual production. The findings show that trans-semiotizing helps bilingual teachers effectively deliver and support content learning, whereas translanguaging enables bilingual teachers to create a positive environment which encourages learners’ multilingual production. This study provides an opportunity for Taiwan’s educators to productively navigate problems arising from the bilingual education policy and nativespeakerism in Taiwan through creatively adapting the PoM. This study concludes with directions for bilingual teacher education.