Teachers' perspectives on translanguaging in EFL classrooms : Discourses around its use in Swedish upper secondary schools

Sammanfattning: This research focuses on teachers’ perceptions of the term translanguaging in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Swedish upper secondary schools. In Sweden, EFL classrooms are characterized by multilingual environments with a diverse set of learners with different backgrounds. This diversity forces teachers to continuously adjust their teaching approaches based on their judgment of what will benefit students’ proficiency levels. This study aims to explore how English teachers perceive the concept of translanguaging, how they apply it, and how they argue in favor of or against it in EFL classrooms. The data are conducted through teacher interviews with four different teachers at a single Swedish upper secondary school. The insights gained from the interviews are analyzed and compared with previous research in the field of language education. The study aims to enhance our understanding of teachers’ perceptions and practices of the term translanguaging in the EFL classroom, with a specific focus on teachers’ perspectives. The presented results indicate that teachers perceive the term translanguaging to be a vague concept, resulting in a vague implementation in the classroom and a preference for primarily adopting an English-only approach. The study also revealed that teachers found the Swedish syllabus unclear regarding the concept of translanguaging. Additionally, the study uncovered that the diverse ways in which teachers use their linguistic resources in the classroom are connected to the fact that the Swedish syllabus does not specify to what extent Swedish should be used in the EFL classroom. Finally, the study revealed that teachers mainly employed spontaneous translanguaging in their classrooms when considered necessary.