‘It is nearly impossible to teach everything in English’: unravelling the translanguaging practices and ideologies of EMI teachers in Saudi higher education

In response to the exponentially growing concerns over the monolingual orientation of EMI, translanguaging has recently received considerable scholarly attention and been brought into the spotlight as a potential pedagogical avenue to promote more effective pedagogy in EMI contexts. Although this interest has been paralleled by a flurry of research, there yet remains a dearth of empirical classroom-based studies on the ways in which EMI teachers utilise translanguaging in their classrooms, the functions for which they do so, and the ideologies behind why they do so, particularly in emerging contexts like Saudi Arabia. To this end, this qualitative study is set to investigate the translanguaging practices of two EMI teachers in Saudi tertiary education, as well as the underlying ideologies that inform their practices. The analysis of the data obtained through the triangulation of video-assisted classroom observations and semi-structured interviews revealed that the two EMI teachers deliberately employed translanguaging practices to serve four pedagogical functions, namely: introducing subject-specific abstract concepts, reinforcing students’ content knowledge comprehension, capitalising on students’ funds of knowledge, and scaffolding students’ engagement and participation. The study concludes by offering theoretical, pedagogical, and policy implications as well as proposing future research directions.