Emotional and conscious translanguaging in non-formal education: linguistic socialisation in residential care homes in a minority language setting

The participants – primarily new speakers acquiring Basque as L1 or L2 often lack opportunities to use the language spontaneously. Moreover, they seldom engage with it in emotionally meaningful ways. An exploratory sequential mixed-methods design was employed, drawing on field journals from seven educators, evaluation notebooks from 72 participants, five semi-structured interviews, and a short quantitative questionnaire validated by five experts. The findings suggest that ECT supports Basque internalisation, reduces communicative anxiety, and increases motivation through informal emotional expression. Its integration into organised leisure activities proved effective across age groups, reinforcing the role of educators as emotional and linguistic referents and highlighting the importance of emotionally safe learning environments. Overall, the results indicate that affective approaches to minority language development have strong pedagogical potential in non-formal educational contexts. They also contribute to inclusive practices and to safeguarding children’s linguistic rights in multilingual, emotionally complex settings.