Pakistani Higher Education Teachers’ Perceptions on Translanguaging Practices in Multilingual Classroom

Abstract

This study employed a quantitative approach to explore and gauge EFL’s teachers’ perceptions and practices towards adapting translanguaging as a teaching strategy in their multilingual classrooms. This study consisted of 93 participants among which 33 are male, and 59 are female teachers working in different private and public sector universities in Lahore. A three sections questionnaire of five Likert-Type scale was administered online with the help of Google Form. The questionnaire was analyzed by descriptive statistics to calculate the percentages of each Likert-type item in the questionnaires. In order to determine the psychometric properties of the measurements, Structural equation model (SEM) was used with Partial least squares (PLS), especially SmartPLS v. 3.2.8. The results show that all the alpha coefficients, composite reliability (CR) estimates and average variance extracted (AVE) values were greater than the criteria of 0.7, 0.7 and 0.50 respectively (Hair et al. 2015; Henseler, Hubona, & Ray, 2016).The percentage of variance explained of factors Pedagogical Technique, Implementation and Translanguaging were 59, 61 and 47 respectively. Whereas the both reliability coefficients, i.e., Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability were ranging from 83 to 93.The study concludes that the teachers are aware of the basic concept of translanguaging but they are not using translanguaging as a scaffold strategy in their multilingual classroom. The study suggests that the teachers might be trained in implementing translanguaging in a systematic way to enhance the learning skills of the students.