Translanguaging Through Play: PLAYMOBIL Pro-Mediated Serious Play as an Inclusive Assessment Framework in Multilingual Higher Education (UK, Albania, and Kosovo)

Traditional assessment practices in multilingual higher education continue to privilege text-based and monolingual demonstrations of learning, often limiting multilingual students’ opportunities to draw on their full linguistic repertoires and increasing assessment-related anxiety. Responding to calls for more equitable and inclusive assessment, this study investigates PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated Serious Play integrated with translanguaging as an innovative multimodal assessment framework that supports reflection, conceptual understanding, communication, and socio-emotional well-being. Employing a qualitative, comparative action-research design, the study was conducted across three higher education institutions in the United Kingdom, Albania, and Kosovo through three iterative action-research cycles involving implementation, observation, reflection, and pedagogical refinement. Data were triangulated through students’ three-dimensional PLAYMOBIL pro models accompanied by multilingual oral narratives, end-of-module reflective reports, qualitative post-intervention surveys, and lecturers’ observational field notes. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated translanguaging created an inclusive, dialogic, and low-anxiety assessment environment in which students exercised greater agency by drawing on their full linguistic and semiotic repertoires. The tactile and spatial affordances of PLAYMOBIL pro models enabled students to connect abstract disciplinary concepts with personal, cultural, and socio-economic experiences. Comparative findings highlighted contextual variations across sites. Students in the United Kingdom frequently described reduced English communication anxiety and increased confidence in expressing complex ideas, whereas students in Albania and Kosovo more often drew on translanguaging and spatial representations when engaging with regional and international business concepts. Across all settings, successive action-research cycles were associated with richer reflection and more elaborate conceptual explanations, suggesting that iterative pedagogical refinement may have contributed to these developments alongside the affordances of the PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated approach. This study advances scholarship on multilingual assessment by proposing an evidence-informed framework with potential applicability across multilingual higher education contexts and by illustrating how PLAYMOBIL pro-mediated Serious Play may support equity, learner agency, and meaningful participation.