EFL learners’ translanguaging on social media: An interpretative phenomenological study

In a globalised environment where social media saturates daily life, bilingual EFL learners move between languages with an ease that has made translanguaging feel almost habitual. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the kinds of identities they fashion for themselves in these online spaces, or about the pressures and motivations that tug these practices in different directions. This study set out to trace how Indonesian EFL learners negotiate their identities through translanguaging on social media and what conditions those choices. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, we worked with eight learners and talked through their experiences in a series of semi-structured interviews. An inductive reading of the dataset brought five broad themes into view, supported by twelve more finely grained subthemes. What emerged was a set of identities that shifted across contexts: participants saw themselves, at various points, as developing English users, as part of particular groups, as individuals asserting personal voice, and as members of Generation Z whose communicative habits online form a recognisable part of their generational identity. Their translanguaging practices were prompted or coloured by several factors, among them emotional expressiveness, the pull of social trends, and a sense of how different audiences might receive their posts. The study considers what these patterns might mean for supporting digital translanguaging in EFL settings.