Exploring Teachers’ Perceptions of Translanguaging as an Emerging Pedagogical Practice in Pakistani ESL Classrooms

Abstract

The current research examines the perceptions of ESL teachers towards translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in secondary school classrooms in District Bahawalpur, Pakistan. Although institutional policies have required English as the only language of instruction, translanguaging, or the strategic and intentional use of the first language (L1) of learners in addition to the target language, has become a common instructional practice among ESL teachers in multilingual settings. Since a significant percentage of Pakistani school students show low levels of English language proficiency and often feel anxious when learning a second language, it is of significant pedagogical and policy interest to learn how teachers perceive and use translanguaging. The research design was a quantitative descriptive study, where the data were gathered using a purposive sample of 50 English language teachers in secondary schools (25 males and 25 females) who were non-native English speakers and had over five years of professional teaching experience. The main data collection tool was a close-ended Likert-scale questionnaire. The results indicate that the perceptions of teachers towards translanguaging are mostly positive: 96% of the participants agreed or strongly agreed that L1 use helps students with low English proficiency, and 72% strongly agreed that translanguaging enhances positive teacher-student relationships. Moreover, 57% of the respondents said that they used both Urdu and English as the medium of instruction, and only 16% said they used English only. The findings also show that teachers consider translanguaging especially significant in explaining grammatical rules, with 88% of them agreeing or strongly agreeing that it should be used to explain grammatical rules. In general, the research finds that translanguaging is an effective, contextually sensitive, and affectively supportive pedagogical practice in Pakistani ESL classrooms, and that national language education policy should be revised to represent the multilingual realities of classroom practice more accurately.