Lecturers' Translanguaging Practices In English-taught Classes in Turkey

This article presents a qualitative study that investigated lecturers’ translanguaging practices in English medium instruction (EMI) courses in a Turkish higher education setting. A comprehensive investigation of the functions of translanguaging used by students and lecturers is conducted following Lo (2015) and Sahan and Rose’s (2021) frameworks which propose the functions of content transmission, classroom management, social and affective functions. Sixteen hours of EMI lessons from eight different content courses were video-recorded. The findings demonstrate that lecturers used translanguaging mainly for content transmission by translating technical terminology, presenting new content, and asking questions related to content. They also used translanguaging to maintain classroom management via providing “off-content” information related to the course function and for social and affective functions such as establishing rapport. These functions have also been observed in other studies in various EMI settings (e.g., Söderlundh, 2013; Tarnopolsky & Goodman, 2014; Sahan & Rose, 2021) but our findings revealed important context-specific differences. These differences and the pedagogical implications derived from the findings will be elaborated in this study.