VietTESOL International Convention 2026

Translanguaging has been globally recognized as a powerful pedagogy that provides various benefits to students’ learning process. Given the limited insights into pre-service teachers in Vietnamese context, this study aims to investigate pre-service teachers’ cognition, their practices of translanguaging in actual teaching contexts as well as factors contributing to these two constructs. A qualitative case study approach was adopted to conduct this study. This study collected data from 11 pre-service teachers through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews, subsequently analyzed by thematic analysis. Findings indicate that participants held ambivalent perceptions about translanguaging: recognizing the pedagogical values of Vietnamese in English teaching while maintaining that English should dominate the instructions. Paradoxically, actual teaching practices revealed a significantly higher use of Vietnamese, and their choice of language was characterized as spontaneous, intuitive and situational. The mismatch emanates from the complex interplay between prior schooling experience, professional coursework and contextual factors. Insights from this study offer practical implications for teacher training programs and policy makers. Professional coursework should introduce explicit translanguaging guidance for preservice teachers, providing them with theoretical background and strategies to implement it effectively and meaningfully. At a broader level, policymakers should reform the testing objective, directing towards developing overall language ability rather than linguistic accuracy.

Keywords: translanguaging, Vietnamese pre-service teachers, cognition, practice