Teachers’ practices and perceptions of translanguaging in a trilingual minority context: evidence from Inner Mongolia

Translanguaging challenges monolingual ideologies that conceptualize languages as discrete and separate systems in education. While an expanding body of research has examined translanguaging in bilingual schooling, less attention has been paid to how teachers mediate multilingual repertoires in trilingual minority school contexts, particularly in China. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates teachers’ practices and perceptions of translanguaging in a Mongolian ethnic secondary school in Inner Mongolia, China, where Mongolian and Putonghua coexist as instructional resources within everyday classroom interaction. Grounded in a repertoire-based understanding of translanguaging as both a theoretical and analytical framework, the study adopted an ethnographic design involving one month of classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with five teachers. Analysis of classroom discourse and interviews revealed that translanguaging was pervasive and functionally integrated into instruction rather than occurring as incidental language mixing. Teachers strategically orchestrated multilingual resources to serve three interrelated pedagogical functions: interpretive, managerial, and interactive. While some teachers viewed translanguaging as goal-aligned pedagogical scaffolding, others expressed reservations related to language norms and assessment expectations. Overall, the findings conceptualize translanguaging as purposeful repertoire deployment shaped by pedagogical goals and institutional constraints.