CARLA Fellow Presentation: Translanguaging in Assessment: A Phenomenological Inquiry Into EAP Students’ Lived Experiences

Using a phenomenological approach, this study explored English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ lived experience of translanguaging during formal assessments. The guiding question was: How do EAP students use and experience translanguaging in exams? Participants were 20 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates in an English Language Teaching program in Iran who had engaged with translanguaging throughout a subject-specific course and were allowed to draw on their full linguistic repertoire in the final exam. Data consisted of lived-experience descriptions, elicited metaphors, and follow-up interviews. Preliminary findings suggest that translanguaging in assessment was not a stable or uniform strategy; instead, it emerged through students’ shifting relationships with their languages, their emotions, institutional expectations, and broader language ideologies.

 

Presenter
Mohammad Naghavian is a PhD student in Multilingual Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and was selected as the CARLA Fellow for 2025–2026. His current research interests include speaking fluency, learner and teacher beliefs, translanguaging, metaphor analysis, and phenomenology. He earned both his BA and MA in English Language Teaching (ELT) in Iran. His research has been published in The Modern Language Journal.