Building Language Bridges in University Bridging Programs

Dr. Minlu Shi, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia

When I first joined an English bridging program as a teacher in Australia, I quickly learnt the unwritten rule: real learning happens in English. Even a stray browser tab showing Chinese text could raise eyebrows. I knew this because a coordinator reminded me that Chinese text should not appear in a classroom computer's browser history. I am Chinese-born and raised, and I felt like an imposter, as if my Chinese-ness was a liability that needed to be carefully managed.

I can see why this language policing exists. The program is a 10-week course providing direct university entry for (mainly Chinese) international students who need to meet English requirements. As Dan Zhou said in his recent post, there may have been an issue with my legitimacy as a teacher in this context. Most of my Chinese students are desperate to practise English in this course, and the non-Chinese-speaking students are interested in understanding what is going on, and both of these mean the use of English rather than Chinese to communicate.

So, should we just ban Chinese in class? Is it worth the slower reading, thinner arguments, quieter tutorials, and group work where students spend more time decoding than constructing knowledge? As you can probably tell from the loaded question, for me, the answer is no. In this program, my job is not only to teach the students to learn English but also how to navigate the academic world of higher education. A bridging program, given the name, really should link past and present experiences, and this includes language experiences.

So I started to experiment with harnessing students’ different linguistic resources for their learning. My focus was on the students’ use of language, not my own. I continued to speak in English in order to include the non-Chinese-speaking students.

One idea was to adapt a jigsaw reading activity. Students first worked in pairs with peers who shared the same home language to read and understand an assigned section of the reading. They discussed the structure, clarified confusing concepts, and took notes in different languages, diagrams or mind maps. If there was no one who shared their language, the students completed the exercise using their own language resources, moving into English for any discussion in their pair.

This initial step created a ‘translanguaging space’ (Li, 2011) where students deployed their full linguistic repertoire to grapple with complex ideas for deeper comprehension and analysis. During this type of jigsaw activity, it was evident that students demonstrated strategic use of languages to analyse the structure and content, English to refer to the original text, and diagrams to sort out the relationship between different ideas. Deploying different language resources shifted the focus from a compartmentalised form of challenge – decoding English and then comprehending abstract concepts – to a singular focus on comprehension. The shift allowed students to engage more deeply with the material, debating nuances and connecting ideas to their existing knowledge.

Ensuring the final product in English was important for the next step of the activity. The groups were rearranged so that each new group had one ‘expert’ from each of the original sections of the reading. Each student was responsible for teaching their section to new group members including those who did not share their home languages. This is where the transition to English was crucial. Students had to practise using English to summarise and reflect on what they just learned. The initial small-group work allowed the students to come to the mixed group with a higher level of comprehension. In the process, students practised essential academic skills, such as structuring an academic explanation, selecting precise vocabulary, using appropriate signposting language, and responding to questions. 

In my experience in the bridging program, leveraging students’ different language resources was not about replacing English as the common language of instruction or excluding non-Chinese-speaking students, but strategically using students' full linguistic repertoire to deepen learning. I differentiated between the learning process and the final product, separating the meaning-making related to learning content from practising and ‘displaying’ knowledge in English.

Ultimately, when we narrow the linguistic resources students can use to learn, we narrow the quality of learning itself. In my classroom, my students still bring their full linguistic experiences to the table, such as Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, dialects, and different registers. Embracing this multilingual reality is not a concession but a direct route to clearer ideas, more precise reasoning and students who recognise themselves as authentic participants in the academic discourse of the university.

Reference

Li, W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222-1235. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035