Translanguaging and Collaboration in EFL Writing

Translanguaging pedagogy has been shown to promote second language (L2) writing development (Garcia, 2014; García & Kano, 2014; Turnbull, 2019; Zhang, 2019). This study examines how exposure to translanguaging pedagogy influenced Kurdish EFL learners’ engagement in collaborative writing during a seven-week intensive academic English writing course. Two intact courses were assigned to translanguaging pedagogy or English-only pedagogy. Recordings of randomly selected pairs of students and assessment of written products were used to determine whether translanguaging pedagogy impacted learner engagement in collaborative dialogue and the quality of their collaboratively written texts. The results indicate that students who experienced translanguaging pedagogy engaged more frequently in language related episodes (LREs) than students in the monolingual classroom. Students who experienced translanguaging pedagogy also wrote higher quality texts as measured by the course rubric. These findings suggest that incorporating translanguaging pedagogical practices may increase the effectiveness of collaborative writing in foreign language classrooms.