Although English–Chinese bilingual development has been studied in community contexts, it has not been adequately addressed in the K-12 Chinese immersion classrooms despite the increasing number of Chinese immersion programs across the United States. To inform effective pedagogies in Chinese immersion classrooms, this study reports on a nine-month ethnographic study conducted in a 4th/5th Chinese immersion classroom. Adopting an ecological lens, this study examines the instructional discourses emerged when translanguaging is encouraged in an immersion context where the majority of the class are English-dominant speakers. Findings demonstrate several instructional and communicative affordances of the teacher’s and students’ translanguaging through various modalities. Findings also reveal that students appropriate their linguistic and semiotic resources in response to the locally negotiated language norms and tensions. This paper discusses the challenges and pedagogical implications of incorporating translanguaging in foreign language immersion contexts in order to foster an equitable learning space for students from various social and linguistic backgrounds.
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