Translanguaging as Communicative Agency: Bangladeshi EFL Teachers' Professional Identity Work in English Classrooms

Abstract

This article examines how Bangladeshi EFL teachers use translanguaging as communicative agency and identity work. Drawing on an instrumental case study of five teachers in secondary, higher secondary and college classrooms, this study investigates how they organise Bangla–English movement during communicative tasks as well as how they narrate that movement's bearing on their professional legitimacy. Also, it explores how students at differing proficiency levels receive it: as scaffolding, as communicative access, or as a dependency risk. Ten classroom video recordings, ten semi-structured interviews and three student focus groups were analysed through classroom discourse analysis and reflexive thematic analysis. Theoretically, it puts translanguaging into dialogue with poststructuralist language teacher identity theory and Bourdieu's sociology of language. The central contribution is translingual professional legitimacy (TPL), an identity position grounding credibility in bilingual communicative effectiveness rather than monolingual English idealism. TPL names what practice already enacts; four empirical indicators make it analytically tractable. Three patterns emerge. Teachers' repertoires are purposeful and functionally differentiated; legitimacy claims form a gradient that institutions mediate and experience alone does not explain; and learners respond differentially by proficiency, unsettling celebratory accounts of multilingual pedagogy. The article reconceptualises translanguaging as communicative agency in Global South EFL settings, with implications for teacher development and language-in-education policy.