Cathy Wong, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and M.Ed./ESL program director at Monmouth University, recently published an article, “Translanguaging as a Mediator to Motivate, Support, and Engage Students in a Chinese-Medium Instruction Program,” in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Wiley, 2025). Her work focuses on translanguaging, the use of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire.
This study, supported by a transformative learning grant from the School of Education, originated from the Chinese-as-a-medium-of-instruction (CMI) summer program designed and directed by Wong. The research explores how multilingual, multimodal, and culturally relevant practices shaped students’ motivation and engagement in a beginner-level CMI context.
Using multimodal conversation analysis, Wong analyzed classroom interactions and triangulated findings with ethnographic data derived from interviews with the CMI program’s teacher and eight students. Her findings conclude that translanguaging is a mediator in “enhancing motivation, building confidence, and making learning and writing Chinese characters more accessible and engaging.”
Wong suggests future research on this topic should expand to explore implementing translanguaging pedagogy across diverse educational contexts to examine its long-term impact on student motivation.