The effects of translanguaging pedagogy on listening and reading comprehension and learners' perspectives on translanguaging in an EFL context

Integrating translanguaging pedagogy into language classes to create 'translanguaged language classes' can be possible through adopting one of the 'fluid languaging' or 'fixed language' approaches. Fluid languaging approach encourages the use of all linguistic and semiotic repertoires for effective communication whereas fixed language approach accepts different languages as social realities and suggests that transfers from one language to another is natural for multilingual people. It promotes switches among known languages for communicative and educational purposes. The focus is more on linguistic repertoire in the fixed language approach; therefore, it might be more appropriate approach to use while designing the classes with a translanguaging pedagogy in EFL context. Through using 'fixed language approach, this quasi-experimental study with both quantitative and qualitative data has two main purposes. Firstly, it aims to reveal beliefs for translanguaging in the Turkish EFL context. Secondly, it investigates the effects of translingual pedagogy on language learners' listening and reading comprehension by proposing a translanguaging technique for the EFL contexts. The study is significant because it is one of the few studies investigating the translanguaging beliefs of learners at tertiary level in a Turkish context. It presents a practical technique for designing listening and reading tasks with translingual pedagogy and compares monolingual and translingual perspectives through an intervention. Moreover, it is one of the first studies examining the effect of translingual pedagogy on listening comprehension in the EFL context. The participants were 56 intermediate-level English preparatory program EFL learners at a Turkish university. There were 30 learners in the control group, whereas 26 were in the experimental group. First, beliefs about translanguaging were examined through a questionnaire, and five reading and five listening tasks were conducted with a monolingual perspective in the control group. The same tasks were conducted with translingual pedagogy in the experimental group. Learners answered the same ten comprehension questions in each task. During the tasks, the researcher kept teacher/researcher journals. The listening and reading comprehension of the two groups were compared statistically through the answers to the questions and both groups were compared qualitatively through the data from the journals. The difficulties that the control group had with a monolingual perspective were found with an open-ended questionnaire. Another open-ended questionnaire was conducted with the experimental group to answer whether adopting a translingual perspective can overcome difficulties in the listening and reading tasks with a monolingual perspective. An interview with nine voluntary participants from the experimental group was conducted to triangulate the data. The triangulated data analysis indicated participants' supporting ideas for translanguaging for clarity and efficacy of mostly teaching processes and their frequent translanguaging practices in English classes. The statistical comparison of reading and listening scores indicated a significant difference in one of the listening tasks, suggesting that translingual pedagogy might be promising for teaching listening skills. The analysis of the qualitative data demonstrated that some of the difficulties experienced with a monolingual perspective can be overcome with a translingual perspective. Learners mostly prefer translanguaging for difficult sentences, vocabulary and sharing background knowledge about the topic. They might lack experience or knowledge on how to use the translanguaging pedagogy for learning, therefore designing listening and reading tasks through translingual pedagogy with preview, view, and review steps might be efficient for listening and reading pair work activities. The study indicated some gaps between the ideal and the practice as well. Although learners consider pair or group work activities in listening and reading tasks an opportunity for practice, the experimental group was more active in all phases in their native languages and the target language. Learners' biggest concern was developing a habit of using the native language in the target language class, which might warn planners and teachers to plan allocated time for using the native language in a foreign language class. The final product must always be in the target language, and the time allocated for the native language must be limited, according to the findings. Keywords: English language teaching, translanguaging, translingual pedagogy, multilingualism, translingual breaks, translingual reading and listening tasks