Pedagogical benefits, ideological and practical challenges and implementational spaces of a translanguaging education policy : the case of Bangladeshi higher education / by Abu Saleh Mohammad Rafi

Advisory Panel: Prof. Anne-Marie Morgan, Dr. Florence Boulard, Assoc. Prof. Finex Ndhlovu, Adj. Assoc. Prof. Susan Feez. PhD Dissertation, James Cook University, 2022.

Includes bibliographical references.

Translanguaging pedagogies have been extensively researched for the potential to improve multilingual students' educational outcomes by systematically incorporating their full range of multilingual practices into pedagogical discourses and classroom practices. While most existing research has focused on primary and secondary education in Global North contexts, post-secondary education and the Global South remain underexplored in translanguaging scholarship. Furthermore, there is little to no research on using translanguaging as an education policy in higher education. Against this backdrop, the project explored the possibility of designing translanguaging-based education pedagogies and policies for Bangladeshi higher education (BHE). An explicit medium of instruction policy is not available for BHE. With an unclear policy landscape, public universities use translanguaging as a bilingual practice to enhance the communicative potential, but they fail to reap the full benefits of these practices due to a lack of pedagogic focus, design, and materials. On the other hand, private universities have emerged as English medium instruction (EMI) institutions, exposing Bangladeshi students to a classroom environment where they struggle to master the English language while mastering the content knowledge in EMI classrooms. Using a two-pronged ethnographic research design consisting of linguistic ethnography (Copland & Creese, 2015) and autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), the PhD project collected data through classroom observations, pedagogical interventions, focus group discussions with students, and semi-structured interviews with teachers. It involved approximately 400 participants from first-year arts, humanities, and social science classrooms at two public and two private universities in Bangladesh. The analysis of datasets revealed a disconnect between macro-level language policy discourses and actual practices at meso and micro levels. The disconnect indicated potential affordances TRANSLANGUAGING EDUCATION POLICY FOR HIGHER EDUCATION for accommodating translanguaging pedagogies to inform the medium of instruction landscapes of the universities and provide equitable benefits for students from a range of learning and language backgrounds. The intervention findings demonstrated that translanguaging pedagogies challenged monolingual approaches to education, related curricular content to local language(s) and experiences of students, balanced developing proficiencies in both academic Bangla and academic English, and facilitated quality content acquisition. While participants acknowledged and appreciated the multidimensional benefits of translanguaging pedagogies, several ideological and practical challenges also surfaced in their responses. In light of the findings, the project conceptualised three policy designs: an interim policy, a differentiated policy, and an aggregated policy based on translanguaging pedagogical approaches for BHE and related contexts. These designs are not necessarily sequential but highly situated in nature according to the needs and preferences of the policy arbiters. The project also identified four critical areas for further research: translanguagingoriented assessment, teacher education and development programs, public engagement and policy consultation among stakeholders in the education community, and prestige planning of translanguaging practices for successful implementation of a translanguaging-based education policy.

GED