Implementation and Effects of Pedagogical Translanguaging in EFL Classrooms: A Systematic Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The present study is a systematic review of previous studies dealing with the benefits of translanguaging-based pedagogies in EFL classrooms on students’ language skills in English. On the one hand, the study is of great interest, since empirical evidence showing whether translanguaging in the classrooms benefits children’s learning is still missing. On the other hand, I find the scope of the study very narrow. Therefore, I am happy to recommend it for publication if the authors will be willing to expand the scope of the study and elaborate on the aspects listed below.

First, since the focus of the whole paper is on translanguaging, I think that the authors should make it clear from the beginning that translanguaging pedagogies have first of all a social justice relevance as related to the empowering of students speaking a family language different from the language of school (García & Lin, 2017). For example, the translanguaging instructional design cycle does not include any reference to assessment. I think that this is one of the main reasons why quantitative evidence related to the benefits of translanguaging is scarce.

Second, it is a pity that the study considered “only studies where the intervention was labelled as such” (i.e. translanguaging; p. 9, lines 411-412). Translanguaging pedagogies are often referred to as “multilingual pedagogies” or “plurilingual pedagogies” in many studies. For example, the study by Carbonara et al. (2023) is based on classrooms in which a “strong” form of translanguaging was implemented – using the terminology introduced in the present paper. Nevertheless, the authors refer to this implementation as “multilingual pedagogy”. Therefore, I suggest to extend the authors’ search to terms like “multilingual pedagog*” or “plurilingual pedagog*” to do justice to all studies dealing with the benefits of translanguaging for children’s language skills.

Third, the consideration of studies related only to EFL classrooms is very narrow. As far as I know, very few studies embracing a quantitative approach (beyond the ones considered in the present paper) deal with the benefits of translanguaging on children’s literacy skills. Therefore, I would really appreciate if the authors could extend their review to the consideration of studies dealing – more in general – with the benefits of translanguaging for students’ school achievements/literacy skills. I think that the study would benefit a lot from this addition, being the first review related to this topic.

Fourth, I find the quality assessment presented in the paper (Section 2.7) very unusual as well as unfair to the authors of the reviewed studies. I would encourage the authors to get rid of this qualitative scoring. The authors can discuss strengths and shortcomings of each study in the discussion section. However, if they would like to maintain the qualitative scoring, they should be more explicit about it. For example, the categories for this qualitative assessment (deign, scale, dropout, etc.) are defined in very broad terms. For each article, the authors should motivate why they assigned certain scores to each category. Table S2 is extremely uninformative in this respect. Furthermore, the assignment of these scores should be supported by interrater agreement (notice that an interrater-agreement analysis should also be reported for the selection process in Section 2.5). 

Finally, I would encourage the authors to elaborate more on the type of pedagogy implemented in the school. I find the distinction between strong and weak forms of translanguaging very vague (see lines 17-22 in Section 3.2). I would provide examples of activities that may be characterized as weak or strong. 

For all these reasons, I invite the authors to revise and resubmit the manuscript.

 

References

 

Ofelia García, & Angel Lin, (2017). Translanguaging in bilingual education. In O. García, A. M. Y. Lin, & S. May (Eds.), Bilingual and Multilingual Education (Encyclopedia of Language and Education) (pp. 117-130). Switzerland: Springer

Valentina Carbonara, Andrea Scibetta & Jacopo Torregrossa (2023): The benefits of multilingual pedagogies for multilingual children’s narrative abilities, International Journal of Multilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2022.214867

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I very much enjoyed reading your systematic review Implementation and Effects of Pedagogical Translanguaging in 2 EFL Classrooms: A Systematic Review. I believe this is a worthwhile topic for publication, as translanguaging is a term we often here, yet there is limited knowledge of the effectiveness of this strategy for language learning. I have the following specific comments on the manuscript which I hope will be helpful:

 

Literature Review:

 

I found our literature review to be useful in establishing the context of this research, in particular the detailed description of Prilutskaya (2021) which situates the rationale for this study. I know you have focused your attention on pedagogical translanguaging and give the reader opportunity to look elsewhere for a broader definition of translanguaging itself, however, I believe a short, overall summary of what is meant by the term more generally and how this is distinct from the terms which you eliminate (e.g. code-switching) will be helpful for a non-specialist audience.

 

Methods:

 

Final searches were conducted over a year ago – I recommend searches are re-run between 20220 and 2023 to check no more eligible studies have come about. In addition, why were searches only conducted via databases? This should be justified. At the very least, I would recommend carrying out backwards references checks of all included studies in this review to ensure there are no missing studies. Was publication year the only limiting factor, or was your search limited by language/publication type etc. (e.g. peer reviewed only). Please provide more details.

 

I would like more information about your selection process. How many authors began the first process of abstract screening? Was this conducted by the first author only or did several authors conduct a percentage of screening independently? If so, which authors carried out screening and how many? Of the 5% of titles and abstracts and 30% of full texts that were screened by two independent reviewers, how many were disagreements in the first instance? Can you calculate an inter-rater agreement? What was their authority to review? Did they have a background in educational research and systematic reviewing? Please give some basic details.

 

Data extraction – data were extracted by the first author. Did any additional authors check the data extraction for errors or omissions? If not, I would recommend this is done for a subsection of data extraction forms.

 

Quality assessment: How many of the authors independently conducted the quality assessment? I was unable to find this information in the supplementary material. I would recommend that a minimum of two authors independently conduct this quality assessment and then compare scores to eliminate the possibility of bias.

 

 

Page 5, line 211:

Please ensure you define what is meant by ‘vote counting’ to an audience who may not be familiar with this aspect of systematic reviews.

 

 

Results:

 

Table 1: It would be useful if you included the statistical summaries including effect sizes in a table. It may also be useful to include information about what statistical analysis was conducted.

 

Please can you also address why some studies were classed as ‘unclear’ in their form of translanguaging.

 

Discussion:

 

Please can you include a section about the rationale to include studies with primary age children up to university level and the implications this may have on the practices involved. This could also be linked to the level of proficiency the learners had in the L2. Is translanguaging more effective if the learner is less proficienct in the L2, so they can lean more on their L1, or is it easier to translanguage when you have stronger L2 skills?

 

Limitations: You should also include in your limitations the issues I have raised in the methods section, should it now be too late to address these in your review.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an excellent paper on a much-needed topic. Great job.

Author Response

Thank you. We love reviews like this.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I am happy with the changes that have been made. This is clearly a rigorous systematic review which has been conducted to a high quality. Although I would have liked the searches to be updated (since they were conducted ca.18 months ago), I understand that ten days is an impossible timeframe to conduct this in, and this is a matter for the journal to consider and not yourself.  However I would recommend in future that as a matter of course, an updated search is carried out as a final check prior to submitting to a journal to ensure that the review is not already out of date (i.e. with date limited to the previous year - this is usually a quick screen). However the nature of systematic reviews and academic publishing in general means that reviews are already out of date by the time the peer review and editorial processes have been conducted. This is simply the system we have to live with. I very much enjoyed your review and it is a credit to your team that it has been conducted with such rigour. No further changes requested on my behalf. 

Author Response

Thank you. We very much appreciate the reviewer's time and care in reviewing our ms and the revisions, and for the complementary comments about the rigour of the methods. We agree that the sometimes glacial pace of getting a paper from 'finished' to 'published' means that more relevant evidence may have emerged in the interim. We take well the reviewer's suggestion to re-run date limited searches prior to submission in any future systematic reviews that we conduct. Thank you.