Translingual practices and monoglot policy aspirations: a case study of Pakistan’s plurilingual classrooms

ABSTRACT

Current research in multilingual countries supports local languages and recognizes plurilingual practices as a proficiency (e.g. Luxembourg and Nordic countries in Europe, Bolivia, Argentina, and Columbia in South America). Yet linguistically diverse and multilingual regions, such as Pakistan, continue to be challenged by monoglot language policies dominated by English. Replacing Urdu and the regional languages in education, Pakistan’s latest national education policy mandates professional and higher education in English. This paper using a multilingual theoretical framework that studies empirical data from the linguistic landscape and local classrooms illuminates unique language contact zones and plurilingualism as a competence. It also exhibits inconsistencies between the policy aspirations and people’s dispositions towards linguistic (im)purity and hybridity. The findings from the paper indicate the need of orientations to a language-in-education policy that does not isolate languages, but which accommodates plurilingual repertoires and a metalinguistic awareness.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingual competence
• Pakistan
• English language-in-education policy
• linguistic diversity
• multilingual first language acquisition

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Professors Suresh Canagarajah and Thomas Christie for their insightful observations on this paper. She would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their very useful feedback that greatly improved this paper. Part of the data used in this paper was collected by Luqman Hakim for a project on code choices by Pakistani students in Islamabad between 2009 and 2012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Hina Ashraf is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Air University, Islamabad. Her chief research interests are the language-in-education policy and planning, English in multilingual contexts, and the role of the language of schooling in social capital formation. Her papers focus on English for academic purposes and as medium of instruction in Pakistan, and the communicative practices and negotiation strategies of ESL speakers as they negotiate space for themselves in multilingual societies.

Notes

1 Ethnologue records show the existence of more than 700 spoken languages in the South Asian region comprising of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

2 Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Newspapers and periodicals by language and province. http://www.pbs.gov.pk/content/newspapers-and-periodicals-language-and-province Retrieved 1 December 2016.

3 E-Govt, Electronic Government. “Ministry of Information, PBC”. Ministry of Information and Mass-media Broadcasting. Government of Pakistan. Retrieved 6 June 2012.

4 Islamabad is the capital, where literacy rate is about 80% and the public sector schools are predominantly English medium.

5 Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital and Research Center, Peshawar.

6 As a whole, 36 students listened to the first 3 audios (En, Ue, Pi), 36 students listened to the second order of the audios (Ui, Pn, Ee) and another 36 participants listened to the third order (Pe, Ei, Un). Where, E = English; U = Urdu; P = Plurilingual; i = Instructional; e = Expository; n = Narrative.

7 Gender, age, and schooling background for each participant is presented with each example.