Translanguaging practices in Turkish EMI classrooms: Commonalities and differences across two academic disciplines

Abstract

The adoption of English-medium-instruction in higher education is a strategic response to the internationalisation of higher education and an attempt to alleviate concerns about graduate employability and academic reputation. Policy-makers tend to favour ‘English-only’ approaches to content teaching, although imposing monolingual perspectives on bi/multilingual staff and students has been perceived as threatening to local languages and is often detrimental to students' learning. Therefore, this study explores the functions and effects of the linguistic practices emerging from situated interactions in Turkish EMI settings and contributes to our understanding of L1 use in EMI. In particular, it investigates how translanguaging practices respond to different learning and interaction needs within and across the specific communicative norms, pedagogical practices and literacy demands of different disciplines, given that not enough research has begun to consider disciplinary influences in EMI classrooms yet. The data obtained through audio-recordings and classroom observations were analysed via Conversation Analysis with a focus on disciplinary interaction-design mechanics. The study evinces that, although there are both similarities and differences in the programmes studied, translanguaging is a critical part of classroom practices and that most students and lecturers use them strategically to varying degrees and for various functions based on the nature of the disciplinary needs. It offers important implications for stakeholders in Turkish universities and other emerging EMI contexts as to how translanguaging could be effectively integrated as a critical learning/teaching tool into specific disciplinary curricula and into the design of EMI staff training programmes.