Translanguaging in EFAL Assessment: Pre-service Teachers Navigating a “Pedagogy of Compromise"

Abstract

In South African multilingual classrooms, assessment remains constrained by monolingual English frameworks, creating a systemic contradiction with additive bilingualism policies. This qualitative study explores how pre-service teachers navigate this contradiction and argues that they are often socialized into a “pedagogy of compromise.” Within this approach, translanguaging is accepted as a scaffold in formative assessment but largely excluded from high-stakes summative assessment, thereby sustaining English's dominance. Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from twenty-fourth-year pre-service teachers, the study, using reflexive thematic analysis, identifies a persistent gap between beliefs and practices. While participants recognized the potential value of translanguaging, many showed conceptual confusion between translanguaging and code-switching. In practice, home languages were predominantly used as a bridge to support learning, rather than as legitimate resources for demonstrating knowledge in assessment. Informed by sociocultural perspectives on learning and language interdependence, and critically attentive to the dominance of English in education, the findings suggest that supporting translanguaging in assessment requires more than technical training. It also involves engaging with underlying language ideologies that shape South African classrooms and assessment practices. The paper concludes by recommending that teacher education programs should create opportunities for critical dialogue, provide practical experience in designing multilingual assessments, and support greater alignment between language policy and assessment practices.