scaffolding applied in a bilingual context for Thai university students learning English.Useful in as much as it shows how the teacher is a sort of ' interpreter ' who acts as a bridge for cultural understanding between two very different cultures and uses the students' L1 to aid this process. From my understanding L1 is used to scaffold L2 and the teacher's shared understanding of the students' culture background, shared by all barr one of the professors, allows the professor to accompany and aid the students in the more complex culturally bound aspects of the language whilst at the same time acting as a mediator who enlightens their journey into the english language and cultural understanding.
Ophelia Garcia coins the term ‘Translanguaging’ to describe how multilingual speakers draw flexibly on languages in mixed and blended forms, in multiple cultural and linguistic communities.
In this paper we look at three identity positions salient in research of young people studying in complementary schools in Leicester, a large linguistically and ethnically diverse city in the East Midlands, England. Our discussion of identity focuses on three identity positions: multicultural, heritage and learner. The first two of these are linked to discussions on ethnicity as a social category. We explore the fluidity and stability of ethnicity as a social description in interview transcripts of young people at complementary schools. In addition, the paper explores another, more emergent identity salient in the two schools, that of ‘learner identity’. The research can be characterised as adopting a linguistic ethnographic approach using a team of ethnographers. Data was collected for 20 weeks by four researchers and consists of fieldnotes, interviews and audio recordings of classroom interactions. We consider the importance of ambiguity and certainty in students’ conceptualisation of themselves around ethnicity and linguistic diversity and look at the institutional role complementary schools play in the production of these and successful learner identities. We explore how complementary schools privilege and encourage these particular identity positionings in their endorsement of flexible bilingualism. Overall, we argue that complementary schools allowed the children a safe haven for exploring ethnic and linguistic identities while producing opportunities for performing successful learner identity. Published (publisher's copy) Peer Reviewed
W. Zou, R. Socher, D. Cer, и C. Manning. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, стр. 1393--1398. (2013)