an investigation to the functions of translanguaging in an esp course

A great deal of attempt has been made in recent two decades to promote bilingual and multilingual values in academia and society. such an attempt has acknowledged that the boundaries between languages are softer and language teaching profession and using language as a medium of instruction should be revised with a more globalized viewpoint. therefore, the use of students’ multilingual repertoire is not forbidden anymore specifically in some contexts. one of such contexts is an esp classroom in which english is the medium of instruction. when students participate in these courses, they are mainly supposed to master content area through english. but sometimes due to their lack of enough language proficiency they fail succeeding in the course. in a number of studies, the use of translangaging by instructors has been introduced as an approach to deal with such challenges. however, a small body of researches has looked for the practical functions of translangaging in an esp classroom. therefore, this study was an attempt to fill such a gap. to this aim, 14 online sessions of an english for information technology course were observed meticulously. to extract the functions of translanguaging, the data went on a thematic analysis. besides, a recoding process was taken into consideration to improve the reliability of the procedure as well as consistency of the extracted codes. the findings revealed four main functions of translanguaging in this course; to provide students with a clear overall view of the course, directions and instructions, grammatical and comprehension explanation and to give the technical words an equivalent. this study can challenge some scholars and stakeholders' traditional monolingual viewpoints towards esp courses by referring to the benefits of using students' multilingual repertoire. further, it can add to teachers and lecturers’ multilingual awareness to hold better and more effective courses through implementing translanguaging.