Conceptualizing foreign language teachers' translanguaging practices: A meta-ethnography of qualitative literature

The concept of translanguaging is increasingly prevalent in the field of foreign language teaching, generating efforts to understand how foreign language teachers use translanguaging and introduce its benefits in the classroom. However, current understandings of teachers’ uses of translanguaging do not yet sufficiently reflect its complexity. Moreover, an integrated model that helps bridge the gap between theory and practice has not been proposed, a criticism often raised by skeptics of translanguaging. To address the need for an increased understanding of translanguaging practices, a meta-ethnographic synthesis of 17 translanguaging studies on teacher-student interactions in foreign language environments was conducted. A synthesis of 96 contextualized excerpts from the studies resulted in a four-layered model, comprising resources, methods, functions, and identity and culture as well as nine components of these layers, which are explained with examples. Findings and discussion are centered on how the model promotes a multifaceted understanding of pedagogical translanguaging and its potential to guide teachers in their translanguaging practices. The model may provide an analytical tool for an in-depth understanding of translanguaging and serve as a searchable directory of related terms for those seeking to explore the notion of translanguaging.