Redefining English language teaching in Punjab: Embracing translanguaging and plurilingual competence for equity, diversity and inclusion

Preeti Suri & Marina Orsini Jones
Coventry University

Translanguaging is an innovative pedagogical approach that embraces and leverages learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity to support learning. It has gained significant traction in multilingual education settings, especially in linguistically diverse contexts like India. This article explores the role of translanguaging in promoting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms in Punjab, in alignment with India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes 45 surveys and five interviews with teachers from various educational settings in Punjab, the study investigates how translanguaging practices are integrated into ELT, the challenges teachers face, and how these practices align with EDI principles. The paper examines whether and how translanguaging promotes linguistic equity and helps validate students’ cultural identities and feelings of inclusion. It illustrates the pedagogical challenges ELT teachers face, particularly in mixed-language and mixed-ability classrooms. The findings show that teachers often struggle with balancing students’ linguistic backgrounds while promoting proficiency in English, the language of instruction. The results also indicate that despite the NEP’s 2020 call for multilingualism in India, problematic issues related to teacher preparedness, classroom management, and resource limitations persist. This study makes an original contribution to the growing body of knowledge on translanguaging and EDI, suggesting that plurilingual competence offers valuable insights for inclusive educational practices. In light of the findings, it proposes that successful implementation will require addressing systemic challenges related to teacher training and educational policy alignment.

Publication history

Date received: 17 February 2025

Date accepted: 19 March 2025

Published online: 11 December 2025

Table of contents

Translanguaging originated in Welsh bilingual education and has since expanded globally. It is now a key strategy for addressing linguistic diversity in multilingual classrooms (Lewis et al., 2012). It is an innovative pedagogical approach that embraces and leverages learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity to support learning (García & Wei, 2014). Translanguaging moves away from traditional monolingual practices, where only the target language is used. Instead, it encourages the use of students’ first language(s) [L1(s)] as cognitive and social resource(s) in the process of learning English as a second (L2) or additional language (EAL) (García & Lin, 2017), thus allowing students to draw on their entire linguistic repertoire to support learning (Rajendram, 2022). In ELT, mainly when English is taught as a foreign language (EFL), translanguaging fosters linguistic equity by allowing students to draw on their mother tongue to enhance their understanding of English. Kachru and Nelson (2006) explain that acquiring multiple languages can result in both distinct uses and some overlapping. Translanguaging differs from code-switching and code-mixing because it involves not only changing languages but also how speakers create and use interconnected communication methods (García & Wei, 2014).

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