AI Support for Translanguaging in International School Classrooms

Abstract

Translanguaging, a pedagogical approach that utilizes multilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires, is especially relevant in linguistically diverse international school contexts. While translanguaging holds potential to improve academic outcomes and support students’ linguistic identities, it remains difficult to implement due to language barriers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support translanguaging practices by providing in-the-moment language support and translations. This study explores the connections between international school teachers’ beliefs and practices around translanguaging, multilingualism, technology and AI. We compare the survey responses from 105 international school teachers and 232 U.S.-based teachers, analyzing the correlation of scores derived from Likert-scale items. Our findings indicate that international school teachers’ translanguaging beliefs and multilingual beliefs are significantly correlated with their reported translanguaging classroom practices, international school teachers’ beliefs on decoloniality are significantly correlated with their beliefs on translanguaging, multilingualism and their translanguaging practices, and there were no significant correlations between teachers’ AI attitudes and their other reported beliefs and practices. In contrast, U.S. teachers had no significant correlation between translanguaging beliefs and translanguaging practices and had a significant correlation between their translanguaging beliefs and their AI attitudes. We discuss how the structural and cultural contexts of international schools may enable more organic translanguaging, teachers’ nuanced views on decoloniality and AI and how these contextual differences may impact the design of AI tools to support equitable, multilingual education through translanguaging.