Abstract
Translanguaging is increasingly recognized as a pedagogical practice in English classrooms, but most existing studies tend to concentrate on what it does and how it is perceived, leaving an open question of how teachers’ translanguaging develops, from spontaneous reactions to intentional pedagogical choices. This longitudinal qualitative case study investigates how translanguaging develops through the experiences of three Vietnamese EFL teachers teaching general English courses at a public university in Southern Vietnam. Data were collected through three sequential semistructured interviews with each teacher across one academic semester and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by the pedagogical translanguaging framework of stance, design and shifts. The findings show that teachers initially employ translanguaging spontaneously to address student confusion, task difficulty, affective concerns and time pressure and still maintain English as the primary instructional language. Over time, repeated classroom experiences enable teachers to transform reactive bilingual shifts into strategically planned pedagogical practices characterized by anticipatory language sequencing, explicit alignment with learning objectives and intentional re-entry into English. The transition from spontaneous to strategic translanguaging was shaped by accumulated classroom evidence, teaching experience, student proficiency, institutional expectations and assessment demands. The study concludes that translanguaging should be considered a developing pedagogical competence rather than a fixed instructional technique. These findings advance translanguaging theory by framing pedagogical translanguaging as a developmental process and suggest implications for teacher education, curriculum design and language policy in Vietnamese as well as other bilingual higher education settings.
Keywords: General English, Pedagogical Translanguaging, Teacher Development, Translanguaging.