Translingual Practice as a Communicative Resource in the Discourse of Foreign Language Teaching Researchers

Abstract This paper reports on a self‐examination of two researchers’ translingual practices while working on a study. The researchers’ translingual practice emerged in the cross‐cutting area of different factors: The first author (Hayriye) was born to Turkish parents and grew up in Germany until the age of 19 before moving to Turkey. Living in Turkey for 32 years, Turkish became her dominant language. The second author (Stefan) is a German native speaker who had lived in Turkey for 22 years. He had acquired Turkish in Turkey without receiving formal instruction. The research site was a Turkish state university. Hayriye was assistant professor in the department of German language and literature, Stefan assistant professor in the English language teaching department. This paper's results are based on the discourse Hayriye and Stefan had while analyzing two German as a foreign language coursebooks. The transcribed discourse was analyzed using code‐switching as the theoretical framework to identify juxtapositions of the three languages used by the researchers (German, Turkish and English), language frequencies and directions as well as syntactic integration, thereby detecting patterns in the researchers’ translingual practices. Also, conversation analysis was employed to identify functions of code‐switches. The results show distinct patterns of each speaker and identified functions that document how language alternation serves as a communicative resource to co‐construct knowledge. Besides, instances of translingual practices can be connected to specific factors of the discourse context, and evidence is provided for multilingual speakers’ awareness of languages as separable systems.