Translanguaging in Nigerian Arabic Classrooms: A Theoretical Reappraisal and Empirical Investigation

Translanguaging theory, which reconceptualises multilingual language use not as interference but as the deployment of a unified multilingual repertoire, has transformed scholarly understanding of bilingual and multilingual pedagogy internationally, yet its application to Arabic classroom contexts in Nigeria, where learners draw simultaneously on Arabic, Hausa, English, and other languages, has not been theoretically developed or empirically examined. This study develops a theoretically grounded account of translanguaging in Nigerian Arabic classrooms and empirically investigates its occurrence, functions, and pedagogical implications across different school and university Arabic learning contexts. Drawing on an extended ethnographic field study in twelve Arabic classrooms across secondary and university settings in Kano, Abuja, and Ibadan, the research generates a corpus of over 200 hours of classroom interaction recordings, supplemented by teacher and student interview data and written text production artefacts. Multimodal discourse analysis is applied to identify and classify translanguaging instances, and thematic analysis maps the functions of translanguaging across instructional, social, and identity dimensions. The study develops an original theoretical framework, the Nigerian Arabic Translanguaging Ecology model, that accounts for the specific language ideological, curricular, and sociolinguistic conditions shaping translanguaging in Nigerian Arabic learning environments. Keywords: Translanguaging, Arabic classrooms, multilingualism, language pedagogy, Nigeria.