A national language policy reflects how a state looks at the languages used by its people. It assigns certain roles to languages, and addresses the issues of language education and language of education. Pakistan, a multilingual country, has yet no language policy at national level. This absence of policy has caused many issues, including the…

Background: Pakistan inherits a multilingual heritage. Along with Urdu, 70 different languages are spoken. The 1973 Constitution officially recognizes Urdu as Pakistan's only national language. Purpose: Until today, the adoption and promotion of Urdu as a medium of educational instruction has remained a point of controversy. Existing research…

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by…

The study proposes that Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) can be deployed as a productive theoretical construct for scholarly activism in a country such as Pakistan where multilingualism and linguistic diversity have historically been seen as problems than assets in education. We illustrate that such activism can transform…

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents…

This study examines the language practices in educational settings in Pakistan, taking the multilingual groupings in society into account. In Pakistan, each province is linked to the single or multiple identities of its people and the languages spoken by the majority. The national language Urdu is limited to educational settings and its function…

In Pakistan where different languages co-exist, and where English has a high status as a second language (L2), the learners' attitudes toward English plays an important role in formulating effective language policies. It is essential that these policies reflect these attitudes and are in sync with the learners' orientations toward learning…

Both Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, and English the official language are widely used for spoken and written communication in different contexts in Pakistan. In education; however, a linguistic divide is evident in the two-stream system of education - mainly referred to as Urdu medium and English medium - according to the dominant…

English as a medium of instruction and communication is becoming a central pedagogy in various countries in the world. In Pakistan, most of the advanced academic institutions use English as their medium of instruction, however students and teachers have been observed communicating in their first languages, especially Urdu, in the classrooms. This…

In this article, we apply Ruiz's language-as-resource orientation to three international settings: Taiwan, Pakistan, and mainland China. Our guiding question was how different languages (indigenous languages, Chinese, and English) were positioned differently as resources in these contexts. For our analysis, we used Lo Bianco's (2001) elaboration…

Sociocultural theory and constructionists propose that language learning is a socially and culturally mediated process, and they emphasize on social interaction. This study examines the amount of students' exposure to the school language to account for the link between English-medium policies in low-fee English-medium schools and children's…

This article discusses the language planning problems that India faces. The distribution and usage of the various languages are outlined. There is considerable linguistic heterogeneity, with 80 languages currently being used as media of instruction at least at an elementary level, and 14 languages being used at the secondary level. Since language…

Traces the controversy about the medium of instruction in Pakistan, beginning with the use of English for elitist education in pre-partition days. Notes that the official policy is opposed by the indigenously educated proto-elite, who would find entry into positions of power easier if Urdu was used and nobody was educated in English. (63…

Pakistan, as a multilingual country, faces numerous problems in language planning in higher education. There are concerns about the limited role of regional languages, lack of required materials in Urdu, and student difficulties in English. The research reported here is a nationwide survey of 2136 students, 121 Subject and English teachers of…