Parental translanguaging in family shared-reading activities in Chinese-German families

Drawing on research on translanguaging, family language policy (FLP) and home literacy environments (HLE), this study examines the nature of translanguaging practices in Chinese-German families during home literacy activities. While translanguaging has been widely discussed in educational settings, less is known about how it unfolds in family literacy activities and how it relates to families’ broader language and educational goals. The study involves three Chinese transnational families in Germany and adopts an ethnographic research design. Data were collected through participant observation and recordings of family interactions in naturally occurring settings. This study shows that parental translanguaging in shared reading functions as a home-based pedagogical practice through which parents scaffold vocabulary learning, text comprehension and metalinguistic reflection across Chinese, German and other linguistic resources. These practices connect reading materials with children’s lived experiences, school-related knowledge and cultural meanings, thereby creating opportunities for multilingual meaning-making in everyday family literacy. More importantly, parental translanguaging constitutes an interactional enactment of FLP, as parents use moment-by-moment language choices to balance Chinese heritage-language maintenance, German school-related development, cultural transmission and children’s multilingual awareness.