One student's essay drafts reveal four translanguaging strategies

Cultures · Published 2 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: A classroom ethnography of a Saudi Arabian undergraduate student tracked how she mixed languages while writing academic essays. Drawing on drafts, journals, peer reviews and interviews, the researcher identified four types of strategies she used to blend her linguistic resources, and found that feedback from her instructor and peers helped her reflect critically on these choices.

This single case suggests multilingual students' own language-mixing can be treated as a resource for teaching academic writing rather than a problem to correct.

The study drew on multiple data sources from one student's coursework, so the four strategy types it identifies may not generalize beyond this case.

Why it matters: Students' own ways of blending languages can be used as teaching tools rather than treated as errors.

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