Attitudinal stance toward translanguaging in Saudi Arabia: A mixed method case study

Abstract

AbstractWith the global demand to engage in a reflexive critique of using English‐only as a medium of instruction, teachers of English in higher education need to find ways to support and scaffold students in the process of learning, and translanguaging (TL), as defined by García and Lin, could be a useful tool for this purpose. Teaching English in Saudi higher education is a worthwhile context to investigate the pervasive practices of TL due to the immense variety of Englishes spoken, varying Arabic dialects spoken in the classes, and the fact that English students are seen as emerging bilingual/cultural students. This study aims to unpack teachers’ attitudes toward TL in Saudi Arabia as well as the ideological underpinnings of those attitudes in order to gauge the openness of teachers to this potentially useful practice. We sought to understand how TL is used as a practice and theory that empowers English language students while tapping into their available resources in the process of learning. Data were collected through a survey and then followed by semi‐structured interviews of five university English language professors. Findings of the current study, especially the interviews, suggested that teachers of English in the Saudi context realize that incorporating more than one cultural, dialectal, and linguistic code in the classroom is a natural, humanistic phenomenon. Results also showed that participants in the present study were ambivalent about its use for ideological, institutional, and pedagogical reasons. The study concludes that TL is viewed favorably by English as a foreign language teachers when both teachers and students share common linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The study implies that teachers and stakeholders can embrace a rhetoric of differences in their classrooms rather than a unitary, one‐sided way of meaning‐making.