Students’ stance towards translanguaging in an EFL oral productive assessment task

Abstract

Albeit the growing plurilingual research due to the new sociolinguistic realities in education and a reaction to the dominant monolingual bias, few studies have focused on plurilingual assessment and students’ ideologies towards using their plurilingual competence and resources such as translanguaging. A total sample of 36 undergraduates who completed a five-month EMI or ESP course in Catalonia, Spain, participated in our study. We examined their stance-taking discourse on a speaking assessment task in which they could draw upon all their communicative resources if they felt that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their message. Findings suggested that, rather than two clear extreme positions, there is a continuum of positions in favour and against the legitimacy of using their whole plurilingual repertoire. Moreover, our results also showed the dominance of a deeply-ingrained monolingual mindset among the learners which leads them to implicitly or explicitly resist the possibility of translanguaging.

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and Agencia Estatal de Investigación under Grant REFERENCIA DEL PROYECTO/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.