PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Translanguaging strategies in the classroom should be established within the Malaysian educational framework, as integrating languages familiar to students enhances their learning process in Malaysian national primary schools, where the medium of instruction is Malay, Indian students taking Tamil classes find learning the language challenging because it is taught in Tamil, which is often not their first language. Translanguaging practices in the Tamil classroom will be useful as they will enhance students’ understanding and make them better speakers of the Tamil language. Hence, the current study aims to identify the language functions of speaking skills and examine the effectiveness of translanguaging in Tamil classes at national primary schools. The study was guided by Tough’s (1976) framework of language functions for school children and Baker’s (2011) study on the effectiveness of translanguaging. A qualitative approach was employed, and the data were collected through classroom audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The findings showed that the predicting, reporting, and reasoning language functions occurred most frequently in speaking skills, primarily through translanguaging between Tamil and English. Furthermore, the findings indicated that translanguaging benefited students who were not fluent in Tamil to be actively involved in the lesson. The current findings are useful to the Ministry of Education Malaysia in carrying out improvements in areas of training teachers to teach bilingual and multilingual students. Furthermore, the findings can help introduce modules with explanations that could enhance Tamil learning in national primary schools.