Pedagogical Translanguaging in Grade 9 English: From Training to Classroom Practice

Abstract

Pedagogical translanguaging has been adopted in EFL education, but limited evidence is available on how secondary school teachers apply it after formal professional training. This study explored how Grade 9 English teachers conceptualized pedagogical translanguaging after training, how they reported using it in classroom instruction, and what factors influenced its implementation in practice. A qualitative interpretive multiple-case design was employed, involving semi-structured online interviews with ten secondary school English teachers from four schools in Southeast Vietnam. Interview data were analyzed thematically to identify recurring patterns across cases. The findings reveal that professional development helped teachers become more conscious of purposeful language allocation, but classroom enactment remained selective rather than fully integrated. Vietnamese was mainly used to support comprehension, activate ideas, and clarify grammar, whereas English played a dominant role in production tasks due to examination pressure, curriculum pacing, and institutional expectations. The study may contribute to the scholarship on post‑training translanguaging in Vietnamese secondary EFL classrooms by showing how teachers integrate it through negotiation between professional learning, personal cognition, and exam‑driven constraints. It also highlights practical implications for designing context‑responsive teacher training in secondary English education.