Exploring teachers’ perspectives on the implementation of a translanguaging pedagogy in two superdiverse Viennese classrooms

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses the implementation of translanguaging in two superdiverse school classes and their teachers’ understanding of translanguaging. Translanguaging as a theory and a transformative pedagogy has recently captured scholars’ interest from all over the globe, but also earned critique for its transformative claims and ongoing expansion of the term (Jaspers, 2018, p. 2). Through a triangulation of ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews, analysed with thematic coding and linguistic text analysis, this study shows that the teachers’ translanguaging pedagogy is strongly characterised by reoccurring elements, such as translation or reading tasks. The data also reveals teachers’ strong beliefs concerning translanguaging and a gap between the terminology of teachers’ everyday experiences and the terminology used in research, which both turn out to be resistant to change.