The Nature of Translanguaging Affordances in Multilingual Secondary English Class: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This qualitative study aimed to determine the translanguaging affordances in multilingual secondary English class, its benefits, the challenges and coping mechanisms in its implementation, and how it shapes learners’ socioemotional development and multilingual identities. The study is gleaned through Wei’s Practical Theory of Language,” which suggests that multilinguals have unified linguistic repertoire rather than separate language systems. Employing sociocultural discourse analysis, this study gathered data from five multilingual secondary English classes through video-recorded classroom interaction and in-depth interviews with 5 teachers and 15 students. Results showed that teachers’ translanguaging pedagogical practices included conceptual scaffolding, contextualizing content, and elaborating instructions, while students practices translanguaging in inquiry, meaning-making, and peer collaboration. Benefits of translanguaging included cognitive, affective, behavioral, communicative, and equity-based gains. Meanwhile, challenges involved linguistic leniency, learner variability, instructional constraints, and linguistic diversity, with coping mechanisms including behavioral adaptability, learner agency, strategic adjustment, and linguistic flexibility. Translanguaging practices also shaped students’ socio-emotional development and maintained their multilingual identity through redistribution of participation power, negotiation of interactional authority, repositioning of learner identity, regulation of emotional expression, transformation of classroom norms, reconstruction of social relations, and disruption of linguistic hierarchies. Data implied that strategic scaffolding, collaborative learning, inclusive design, and student-centeredness are important educational practices in implementing translanguaging. Overall, the study highlights how translanguaging transform classrooms intro psychologically safe spaces that celebrate student identity and foster both academic and social-emotional growth.