Translanguaging in online language teaching: A case study of a multilingual English language teacher in New Zealand

The Covid-19 pandemic has restricted social interactions to online spaces, shifting usual face-to-face classrooms to online platforms. This article investigates how teachers and adult learners in an English as an additional language classroom experience these changes, solve problems that arise and negotiate their teaching and learning methods in an online space. Specifically, we focus on a case involving a teacher practising in an online Zoom English language classroom during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand. The data for this article come from a semi-structured narrative interview, four hours of online classroom observations and a stimulated recall session. Data analysis was conducted using the Interactional Sociolinguistics approach to discourse analysis. Findings from this study show how the teacher shifted to an online space, overcoming initial struggles and negotiating her teaching methodologies, including making use of new technological advancements of the online platforms she used. Additionally, the data highlight the teacher's efforts to maintain pedagogical translanguaging in her online classes as an effective language teaching strategy. However, there are also restrictions in her awareness of benefits of using spontaneous translanguaging in the language classroom, highlighting that her choices do not always align with translanguaging as a form of social justice.