Translanguaging in Hong Kong English Classrooms: A Scoping Review and Implications for TESOL

Abstract

Translanguaging has become one of the most generative and most contested constructs in applied linguistics, and Hong Kong is among its densest empirical sites: a jurisdiction officially committed to biliteracy and trilingualism while operating a medium-of-instruction regime built on language separation. This scoping review maps the empirical research on translanguaging in Hong Kong English classrooms and asks what that evidence will and will not support for TESOL. The review follows the five-stage scoping framework as later enhanced, and is reported against the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). A reproducible boolean search of OpenAlex together with supplementary keyword queries identified 630 unique records, from which 41 studies were charted by educational level, instructional site, subject, participants and analytical approach. The corpus is highly concentrated: 36 of 41 studies are set in secondary schools, 29 in content lessons taught through English, and 17 use conversation-analytic methods. Only one study applies a translanguaging frame to data from English-language-subject classrooms, and none measures English learning gains longitudinally or against a comparison condition. The evidence therefore supports principled crosslinguistic scaffolding with a deliberate return to English, rather than the stronger claim that translanguaging improves English attainment. The English-language classroom is the outstanding gap in an otherwise rich literature.