Translanguaging Pedagogy in the Age of AI

Abstract

This article examines how translanguaging pedagogy can be reinterpreted in the age of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on generative AI, machine translation, multilingual chatbots, and critical digital literacy. The review synthesizes research across K–12, higher education, English-medium, bilingual, multilingual, and EFL settings. The article first reconsiders translanguaging pedagogy as an asset-based, socially situated, and increasingly critical orientation to language education. It then analyzes how AI is reshaping language learning through multilingual explanation, translation, tutoring, feedback, and multimodal composition. The review finds that AI can productively support translanguaging by increasing access to content, scaffolding multilingual writing, enabling crosslinguistic comparison, and broadening participation in multimodal tasks. At the same time, the current evidence base remains methodologically narrow and contextually concentrated, especially in higher education writing studies. Risks include monolingual drift beneath multilingual interfaces, bias against minoritized languages and varieties, hallucination, authorship problems, privacy concerns, and unequal access. The article therefore argues for a human-led, critically literate model of AI-mediated translanguaging pedagogy in which teachers make learning goals, language movement, tool selection, and assessment criteria explicit. It concludes with practical examples, a teacher-education workshop module, and an agenda for future research.