Classroom interactional competence in an English medium instruction mathematics classroom: A creation of a technology-mediated translanguaging space

Second language classroom research has explored how teachers demonstrate their classroom interactional competence (CIC). CIC focuses on teachers’ ability to use appropriate language to mediate students’ learning and promote learning opportunities. Research on translanguaging has highlighted how teachers and students mobilise diverse multilingual, multimodal and spatial repertoires to collectively construct meaning in classroom interactions. Based on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong English-Medium-Instruction secondary mathematics classroom, this paper adopts a case study approach in order to examine how the teacher’s use of iPad expands his choice for using different multimodal repertoire to mediate and assist students’ learning of academic language and mathematical knowledge. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is deployed to analyse the classroom interaction data and it is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. It is evident in the findings that the construction of a technology-mediated space displays the English- Medium-Instruction teacher’s CIC, harnessing the available semiotic repertoires afforded by the iPad in order to achieve his pedagogical goals. I argue that the notion of CIC can be conceptualised through adopting translanguaging as an analytical perspective, which highlights the teacher’s ability in orchestrating technological affordances for creating an interactional space for student learning. Such a conceptualisation reinforces the need for teachers to draw on a wide range of available multilingual, multimodal, and technological repertoire to create a learning environment conductive to interaction and academic and language learning in English-Medium-Instruction classroom.