Investigating Translanguaging in Classroom Interaction

Translanguaging has emerged as a central concept in applied linguistics and multilingual education, foregrounding how speakers draw on their full linguistic repertoires to make meaning in interaction. This study investigates how translanguaging practices emerge, function, and are negotiated in classroom interaction. Drawing on classroom discourse data from a multilingual secondary-level English-medium classroom, the research adopts a qualitative, interactional approach combining discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Audio- and video-recorded classroom interactions were transcribed and analyzed to examine how teachers and students strategically deploy multiple linguistic resources during instructional talk, peer interaction, and assessment-related exchanges. Findings reveal that translanguaging operates as (a) a pedagogical scaffold, (b) a resource for epistemic negotiation and knowledge construction, (c) a means of identity positioning, and (d) a site of power negotiation between institutional language norms and students’ lived linguistic practices. The study contributes to empirical understandings of translanguaging as an interactional achievement rather than a pre-planned pedagogical strategy and highlights its implications for equitable teaching and learning in linguistically diverse classrooms.