Observing a teacher’s interactional competence in an ESOL classroom: a translanguaging perspective

Abstract Research on translanguaging practices in multilingual contexts has explored how translanguaging highlights the multilingual and multicultural nature of social interactions and its transformative nature in transgressing established norms and boundaries. This article aims to provide an alternative view of interactional competence by connecting it to the notion of translanguaging and its emphasis on the active deployment of multiple linguistic, semiotic, and sociocultural resources in a dynamic and integrated way. We argue for extending the notion of interactional competence as we suggest that translanguaging is the practice of drawing on a speaker’s interactional competence for constructing new configurations of language practices for communicative purposes. Such a conceptualization reinforces the meaning-making process as a locally emergent phenomenon and a jointly accomplished social action. It also conceptualizes the undertaking of co-constructing social interactions as a process of translanguaging whereby interactants need to seek out available multilingual and multimodal resources and make strategic choices among these resources in order to achieve their social actions on a moment-by-moment basis. This article utilizes Sequential-Categorial Analysis, which combines Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, in its analysis of classroom video recordings of vocabulary instruction in a beginner-level adult English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages classroom in order to demonstrate our argument.