Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
English language teaching (ELT) in Thailand has long been dominated by the monolingual ideology. However, the country’s English proficiency has consistently fallen short of expectations, with students’ diverse language practices often excluded from classroom instruction. As an emerging pedagogical approach in ELT, translanguaging pedagogy values the learners’ rich linguistic and semiotic resources to enhance teaching and learning. Grounded in an ethnographic case study, this study aimed to explore the phenomenon of translanguaging in English classrooms within Thai higher education. Observations of six online English courses taught by three teachers at a public university in Northeastern Thailand were conducted over seven weeks, followed by stimulated recall interviews with each teacher. The findings revealed that the teachers adopted translanguaging to fulfil various pedagogical functions (i.e. teaching content and language, giving instructions, eliciting responses, giving feedback, and scaffolding emotions) and to support themselves cognitively and emotionally during online teaching. Notably, rather than implementing translanguaging pedagogy in its original form, the teachers recontextualized it to scaffold students’ English learning and create a more inclusive classroom. The study highlights the potential of translanguaging as legitimate pedagogy and calls for moving beyond monolingualism in ELT in Thailand.
Weerachairattana et al. (Tue,) studied this question.