Morphosyntactic Patterns of Translanguaging in Multilingual ESL Classrooms

Abstract

This study investigates the morphosyntactic features of translanguaging in a multilingual classroom context with Grade 11 English Second Language students. The research was conducted in a reading and writing classroom in an academic senior high school with seventy-nine students who used English and Filipino as their lingua franca during the lessons. Employing a descriptive qualitative research design, classroom sessions were audio- and video-recorded and transcribed to extract translanguaging utterances. The collected data were morphosyntactically analyzed and grouped into four levels of structure: word, phrase, clause, and sentence.

The findings show that translanguaging utterances are systematically morphosyntactically organized rather than reflecting arbitrary language mixing. At the word level, both lexical borrowing and morphological adaptation were used; at the phrase level, there was evidence of assimilation between Filipino grammatical markers and English lexical items. There is also a much more complex pattern seen in this interaction at the clause and sentence levels, involving a variety of syntactic structures that have Filipino accomplishment verbs combined with English complements, as well as Filipino discourse particles functioning within English lexical contexts. These structures provide evidence of coordinated grammatical knowledge across languages and show that bilingual speakers produce grammatically coherent utterances by integrating linguistic resources.

Such findings indicate that translanguaging provides evidence of productive bilingual competence and of organized grammatical structuring in communication within multilingual classrooms. This study adds to the body of research on translanguaging by providing morphosyntactic detail of bilingual utterances in an ESL classroom setting. These findings underscore crucial aspects of translanguaging as a systematic linguistic practice and therefore offer valuable insights into the grammatical structure of multilingual speech.