Operationalizing culture in CLIL: translanguaging with multilingual learners in EFL

In China’s English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) context, many ethnic minority students are multilingual and bring distinct sociocultural resources to the classroom. Yet when Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is implemented in EFL settings, Culture is often integrated less systematically into CLIL design than the other three components of Coyle’s 4Cs framework (Content, Communication, Cognition, and Culture). To address this gap, this study positions Culture as the organising spine and examines how it coordinates the other three components, while documenting how multilingual students mobilize their linguistic and cultural repertoires. Forty-five ethnic minority students at a Han-majority university completed a twelve-week ‘Ethnic Culture’ unit, comprising multimodal presentations, peer discussions, reflective journals, and stimulated-recall interviews. The findings show that audience-oriented design and guided multimodality made insider cultural knowledge more legible. Students enacted three-layered cultural identities through translanguaging practices that involved heritage language rooting, Mandarin glossing, and English framing. By embedding Culture at every stage, this CLIL activity facilitated language development, intercultural competence, reflective engagement, and inclusive participation. Overall, the study proposes a culture-anchored 4Cs CLIL model and elaborates its pedagogical value, offering theoretical clarification and pedagogical guidance for multilingual EFL programmes.