Affordances and Limitations of Translanguaging and Writing Tools: A Study of Emergent Multilingual Students' Writing in EFL

Multilingual students writing in English as a foreign/second language has been a major topic in research for many years (see Leung & Valdés for overview). This topic is particularly relevant in Sweden, as reports suggest that students who are speakers of a language other than Swedish (LOTS) in the home have a lower grade average after 9 years of compulsory schooling (Skolinspektionen, 2010; Skolverket, 2023b). The Swedish Schools Inspectorate hypothesizes that this may be due to school staff not taking students’ language backgrounds into account (Skolinspektionen, 2010). A possible remedy is to introduce translanguaging pedagogy, which has been shown to have the potential to benefit all students in the classroom, not just those with a migrant background (Carbonara et al., 2023; García & Wei, 2014).
This study focuses on emergent multilingual students writing in English as a foreign language (EFL), a core subject in Swedish schools in which students sit a national exam at the end of year 9, a gate-keeping test which students are required to pass in order to be allowed entry into upper secondary school (Skolverket, 2024e). The exam prohibits the use of tools and the topic of the exam is revealed only when students sit down to write (Skolverket, 2024d). Considering how writing practices have dramatically changed though the abundance of tools, such as machine translations and word prediction, in writing practices outside of school (Oh, 2020), the national exam does little to bridge writing experiences outside of school with in-school practices.
Both national (Hirsh, 2016) and international research (Küçük, 2023) suggest that high-stakes testing, such as the national exam, causes some students anxiety. During the last decade in Sweden we have seen a decline in students’ mental health, connected to factors such as testing and assessment (Klapp et al., 2023). Research shows that allowing students access to tools can boost student confidence (Oh, 2020), making access to tools during assessment an avenue worth pursuing.
Taking a sociocultural approach to teaching, the study explores two classes of year-9 students’ use of translanguaging and writing tools through the means of an intervention. The intervention introduced translanguaging and writing tools based on positive outcomes found in previous research of students’ writing in foreign or second languages (see for instance García & Velasco, 2014; Zhang, 2018). Drawing on observation, interviews, questionnaires and focus-group discussions, the results show students engaging in exploratory talk, a type of talk found to be conducive to learning (Mercer et al., 1999), while translanguaging in the classroom. While translanguaging, using minoritized languages, such as Albanian and Bosnian, there were signs that the status of languages was levelled, as all languages were recognized as valuable tools. Also, student interaction showed on-task talk to a high degree (92.4% to 99.6%). The writing tools introduced were found to be appropriated to different degrees by students and mediated different actions in their writing, such as metalinguistic awareness, lexical access and idea generation. The mediation of the tools was found to impact students’ writing in different ways, supporting them with matters such as lexical variation and accuracy, problem solving and with self-efficacy beliefs.
The results of the study support a re-conceptualization of writing as a skill in the subject of EFL to include the use of writing tools and translanguaging. To incoporate students’ use of tools would not only concur with the current syllabus for EFL (Lgr22), but would better reflect students’ writing needs in their future academic and professional lives.