Beyond bilingualism: translanguaging and diglossic management in Arabic early childhood teachers’ storybook reading practices

This study examines how Arabic-speaking kindergarten teachers in monolingual settings in Israel navigate the diglossic divide between Spoken Arabic and Standard Arabic during shared story reading. Using a linguistic ethnographic design, it draws on video-recorded observations, field notes, and interviews with fifteen teachers, combining qualitative analysis with quantitative mapping of strategies. Translanguaging emerged as the dominant orientation (73.3%). Rather than alternating between bounded codes, teachers moved along a lexico-phonological continuum. A distinctive practice identified is Register Levelling: intra-register adjustment within StA through substitution of lexically distant forms with accessible cognate or identical items. Cognate-focused strategies (15.6%) worked by making phonological correspondences between spoken and standard forms explicit; direct translation (11.1%) appeared sparingly and was seen by teachers as counterproductive. For translanguaging theory, the implication is structural: in diglossic settings, repertoire deployment operates not across separate systems but intra-systemically. What the data foreground is teacher cognition itself: diglossia recast not as variety choice but as the active management of lexical distance, a reframing with consequences for both teacher education and language policy.