Twelve Years Revisited: Translanguaging as Relational Pedagogy for Sustaining Language Learning Motivation

ABSTRACT This study examines how foreign language teachers’ beliefs about the medium of instruction and translanguaging evolve over time by revisiting three in‐service teachers twelve years after their initial interviews. Using a qualitative longitudinal design, the study traces how translanguaging was initially framed as pedagogically deficient but has since become normalised as a relational pedagogy for sustaining learner engagement and commitment to language study. The findings show that this shift is driven primarily by teachers' accumulated professional experience and pragmatic responses to language learning decline, rather than by engagement with translanguaging theory or top‐down policy mandates from their institutions. Translanguaging is enacted as a relational practice through which teachers build stronger relationships with students to maintain motivation, while also negotiating and, at times, contesting structural inequalities within educational organisations. By conceptualising translanguaging as relational pedagogy rather than a technical instructional choice, the study foregrounds the socially mediated nature of language learning motivation and illustrates how it is reshaped over time as teachers’ priorities shift in response to governance pressures and classroom realities. The study contributes to translanguaging scholarship by providing a longitudinal account of teacher belief change and offers implications for language policy, teacher education and methodological approaches to researching pedagogical transformation.