Bilingual teachers’ translanguaging practices and ideologies in online classrooms in Saudi Arabia

Prior studies in translanguaging have investigated its role in education from different perspectives to understand its efficiency, practicality, and how it promotes or challenges educational and societal aims in different multilingual contexts across the world. However, little attention has been paid to translanguaging in universities with a monolingual environment. To cover this gap, the current study examines teachers' online translanguaging practices and ideologies in Saudi Arabia, where the community language is Arabic but English is commonly a medium of instruction in higher education. The study investigated (a) teachers' practices and perspectives toward translanguaging while communicating online with learners; and (b) how, when, and where teachers find translanguaging to be productive. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach to survey 260 bilingual instructors from universities in Saudi Arabia. In addition, 20 teachers’ video-recorded sessions are observed to assess the functions of translanguaging during online synchronous instruction. Five of these teachers are interviewed using stimulated-recall techniques. Results show that the teachers mostly hold positive views about translanguaging, considering it productive in helping students understand complex terms and in engaging in communication inside and outside the classroom. The data suggests that bilingual teachers of Arabic and English prefer the new bilingual approach of translanguaging and appear to depend less on the traditional monolingual approach to teaching in multilingual contexts.