Encouraging translanguaging in collaborative talk in EFL classrooms: An epistemic network comparative study

• Translanguaging enhanced the quantity and quality of EFL classroom interaction. • Translanguaging helped EFL students produce more exploratory talk. • ENA showed translanguaging had five major functions in EFL learners’ interaction. • EFL students used three major translanguaging strategies in their collaboration. • Translanguaging pedagogy should be advocated in EFL classrooms. This study adopted a modified Mercer's framework on types of talk and epistemic network analysis to explore the collaborative talk of four groups of undergraduate students in an EFL classroom in southwest China. Two groups were encouraged to use multilingual resources while two others were asked to use English only. The results showed that translanguaging helped students produce more exploratory talk, but less cumulative talk, display a more balanced and sophisticated cognitive network, and have a better performance in higher-order thinking. Students used the translanguaging strategies of code-switching, code-mixing, and cross-language recapping to ask for facts, share ideas, propose alternative ideas, explain and justify themselves. Translanguaging can improve the quality of students’ collaborative talk while not diminishing the quantity of their English language output. Therefore, it's advisable to advocate translanguaging pedagogy in EFL classrooms, but students should be guided to use translanguaging strategies flexibly and avoid overusing their L1.