Digital Interactions and Linguistic Repertoires: Evidence from English Language Teacher Trainees at Kyambogo University, Uganda

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to investigate digital interactions and linguistic repertoires among teacher trainees at Kyambogo University in Uganda. It examines how three digital interactions trainee-trainee, trainee-lecturer, and trainee-content influence the linguistic repertoires of English language teacher trainees. The contention of the article is that digital platforms have become routine components of teacher education in multilingual contexts, yet the linguistic consequences of this integration remain empirically under studied. Drawing on a convergent mixed-methods study of 150 teacher trainees and 10 ELT lecturers, the study found that trainee-content interaction was the strongest predictor of linguistic repertoire development (β = 0.348, p < 0.001), followed by trainee-trainee interaction (β = 0.206, p = 0.026). Trainee-lecturer interaction showed no significant direct effect (β = 0.069, p = 0.393), suggesting its influence works indirectly through task design and feedback quality. Qualitative findings showed that digital platforms implicitly favour English while marginalising local languages, pushing trainees into translanguaging practices that remain institutionally unrecognised. The article concludes that digital interactions create unequal sociolinguistic environments,