Negotiating English-only gatekeepers: teachers’ agency through a public sphere lens

ABSTRACT

The study is underpinned by the public sphere paradigm, which emphasizes that language policy and planning (LPP) should be studied from the actual practices of local stakeholders/agents and communities within the local sites. This approach allows researchers to understand the complex, multilayered, and dynamic process of policy interpretation, appropriation, and implementation. The study draws on qualitative interviews with 12 English teachers from the elite English–medium schools to show how their agency and agentive responses to policy generate openings for transformative English teaching and learning practices. Agency refers to an individuals' capability to make difference to pre–existing state of affairs. The transformative acts entail teachers creating spaces for multiple languages, cultures, and identities despite strict constraints from the English–only gate–keeping regimes. Findings suggest that teachers who have critical consciousness, solid theoretical knowledge of bi/multilingual education, and critical awareness of LPP can often challenge institutional constraints to open meaningful ‘ideological and implementational spaces’ (Hornberger, 2003) for multilingual pedagogies within the hard–core monolingual institutional environments. We sum up by emphasizing that the scale of these agentive actions may appear tiny and insignificant; however, these reflexive actions showcase substantial symbolic and ideological potential for an epistemic reorientation in the field of English language education.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• public sphere
• policy and planning
• critical reflexivity
• critical consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Syed Abdul Manan holds PhD degree in Applied Linguistics. He presently serves as Associate Professor in Multilingual Education Program in the Graduate School of Education Nazarbayev University Nur-Sultan (Astana) Kazakhstan. His work on sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, Bi/multilingual Education and linguistic landscape has been published in a number of impact factor (ISI-indexed) journals.

Liaquat Ali Channa holds PhD degree in Applied Linguistics. He presently serves as Associate Professor in the Department of English, Balochistan University of IT, Engineering & Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Quetta, Pakistan. His research work has been published in prestigious research journals.

Maya Khemlani David holds PhD degree in Sociolinguistics. She has been working as a Professor in the Faculty of Languages & Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia. She is currently affiliated with the Humanity Cluster, University of Malaya as a researcher, and works as Honorary Academic Consultant, London College of Clinical Hypnosis. She is a widely published scholar in sociolinguistics and language policy and planning.

Muhammad Amin holds masters degree in Linguistics. He is a Lecturer at the English Department, University of Balochistan Pakistan. Email: [email protected]