A social interactional lens on pedagogical translanguaging: the case of teacher- and student-initiated vocabulary work in Bangladeshi EMI classrooms

Research on vocabulary work has yielded a rich understanding of importance and approaches of vocabulary teaching and learning. Nevertheless, relatively lacking is detailed descriptions of how vocabulary work is done in real-life classrooms, in particular bilingual, English as Second Language (ESL) classrooms where participants have different first language (L1) than the target language (L2). Based on a corpus of 43 h of video recordings of two ESL schools in Bangladesh, this study offers a conversation analytic insight into how vocabulary work is done in such classrooms. The research questions guiding this study are as follows: How is pedagogical translanguaging deployed and managed in the accomplishment of vocabulary work in bilingual EMI classrooms in Bangladesh? How are vocabulary explanations and inquiries collaboratively initiated, negotiated, and completed by both teachers and students in and through classroom interactions in those EMI settings? Focusing on two categories of vocabulary work: teacher-initiated vocabulary explanations (VEs) and student-initiated vocabulary inquiries (VIs), the study analyzes how vocabulary work is collaboratively extracted and explained in these ESL settings. The findings contribute to current social interactional literature on vocabulary work shedding light on students’ engagement as a resource and participants’ focus on “form”.