VIETTESOL INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION 2025

Research shows that translanguaging can be a pedagogical tool to foster foreign/second language (L2) acquisition. However, most of these studies often focus on the values of translanguaging in such general classroom functions as explaining abstract concepts, managing the classroom or building teacher-and-students rapport, but not in generating L2 learning affordances. The present study filled this gap. To this end, it first video-recorded an English-as-a-Foreign-Language grammar lesson at a lower-secondary school in Vietnam and then used the psychological and social lenses from the field of SLA to unfold how translanguaging in this lesson created L2 learning affordances or impediments during focus-on-formS, incidental and planned focus-on-form activities. The validity of these learning affordances/impediments were triangulated using evidence from retrospective interviews with the teacher and students involved in those translanguaging episodes. Collected data was iteratively coded by two experienced L2 instructors/researchers using content analysis with an almost perfect Kappa’s inter-rater agreement of .97 (p < .001). The results showed that this teacher often used translanguaging to draw students’ attention to the target grammar point (noticing and attention), negotiate its form and meaning (form-meaning mapping), give relevant feedback (error correction) as well as make teacher and student talk more comprehensible (modified input and output), which all, as students themselves acknowledged in the follow-up interviews, fostered grammatical uptake and retention. There were only a few instances in which students found the teacher’s translanguaging unnecessary, but they did perceive the pedagogical intention behind this practice. These findings offer valuable implications for translanguaging practice in L2 instruction.