Enabling Translanguaging in the Saudi EFL Classroom : affordances and reflections of collaborative translanguaging tasks during reading lessons

Abstract

Translanguaging advocates a new approach to the teaching and learning of multilinguals based on the idea that multilingual learners have one linguistic repertoire, rather than moving between two or more language codes (García and Li, 2014). In the EFL classroom, however, the tendency to use the target language only is still advocated as a pedagogy in education policy. In observations before this study and as a teacher in the context of Saudi Arabia, learners still used Arabic during group discussions in the EFL classroom. This study attempts to allow learners to draw on their full linguistic repertoire in a safe space to reconstitute their languaging processes for learning English during collaborative reading lessons. This study positions translanguaging as collaborative and agentive, viewing learning through a sociocultural framework (Vygotsky, 1978; Mercer, 1995; 2002) In this qualitative study, group observations were conducted to observe translanguaging affordances of learning in two cases of different proficiency level groups of students. Students collectively reflected on their weekly learning and were interviewed and provided a structured written reflection at the end of the seven weeks of translanguaging as allowed in the classroom. The study found that students reflected particularly on awareness of their metalinguistic development as they showed creative ways to mediate their learning in the bilingual ZPD (Moll, 2014). Ultimately, students made their translanguaging purposeful through the active processes of interthinking, thus suggesting new mechanisms for how interthinking functions through translanguaging in the collaborative learning classroom. This research has extended the scope of applying sociocultural and translanguaging theory together to provide empirical evidence for translanguaging pedagogy in the EFL Saudi context. Finally, this study provides recommendations for policy and practice in enabling a collaborative translanguaging pedagogy approach in the EFL classroom.