Translanguaging Under Conditions of Extreme Linguistic Heterogeneity: Evidence from Urban Primary Classrooms in Zambia

Abstract

Translanguaging has become a major framework for understanding multilingual meaning-making in education, yet much of the literature has tended to assume classroom contexts in which learners and teachers share relatively stable or sufficiently overlapping linguistic repertoires. This article examines how translanguaging operates in highly heterogeneous urban primary school classrooms in Livingstone, Zambia, where no single shared learner language can be consistently assumed. Drawing on a qualitative interpretivist case study, the study used classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with twenty teachers and twenty pupils from selected primary schools to investigate patterns of language use, instructional practice, learner participation, and teachers’ engagement with language-in-education policy. The findings show that multilingual classroom interaction was not random but systematically patterned according to communicative role and pedagogical function. English was more prominent in formal teacher-led and teacher-directed interaction, while Nyanja featured strongly in peer clarification and collaborative meaning-making, with Tonga and Lozi appearing in more context-specific ways. Teachers used multilingual practices strategically to scaffold understanding, clarify tasks, and sustain lesson flow, while learners relied on peer-mediated multilingual processing before producing formal classroom responses. The study further found that classroom interaction was shaped by partial linguistic overlap, requiring teachers to make moment-to-moment decisions across unevenly shared linguistic resources. It also revealed a clear mismatch between formal language-in-education policy and the realities of multilingual urban classroom practice. The article argues that in such contexts translanguaging should be understood not only as fluid repertoire mobilisation, but as pedagogical coordination under conditions of incomplete commonality, institutional constraint, and interactional necessity. By foregrounding classroom-based evidence from an underrepresented African urban context, the article extends translanguaging theory and contributes to more context-sensitive understandings of multilingual pedagogy, teacher agency, and language policy enactment.