EMI Content Teachers' Perspectives on Translanguaging in Secondary Education

Abstract

Globalization and linguistic diversity in the world have led to Kazakhstan amending its educational system. The consequential implementation of the Trilingual Education Policy has made it obligatory to study the three languages (Kazakh, Russian, and English) from the primary education level and content subjects in English in secondary education. According to the policy, the languages are taught separately through a monolingual approach, thus the phenomenon of translanguaging is mostly avoided in classroom practices. The purpose of the research is to explore the perspectives of English Medium Instruction (EMI) content teachers regarding the use of translanguaging as a pedagogical tool in teaching. In compliance with the research purpose, the following research questions helped to investigate content teachers’ perspectives about translanguaging: 1. What language attitudes do EMI Content teachers have? 2. What are EMI content teachers’ perspectives on translanguaging? A qualitative research method was used to collect the data via semi-structured interviews. Overall, six EMI content teachers from two Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools were interviewed. The analysis of the obtained data drew on Ruiz’s framework of language ideologies: language as a problem, language as a right, and language as a resource. The findings revealed that teachers do not consider Kazakh to be necessary for education compared with Russian and English; moreover, the English language is associated with development and prestige by the majority of respondents. Regarding translanguaging, participants are mostly positive about translanguaging practices while teaching, and use it for different purposes; however, the languages used for translanguaging exclude Kazakh. The results of the research might be important for policymakers to take into account as it will reveal the perspectives of teachers on the purposeful use of several languages in the classroom. This study implies the necessity of training for teachers on the benefits of using translanguaging as a scaffolding tool.