This article examines four Afghan refugee parents/guardians in Islamabad, Pakistan for their beliefs about literacy and language(s). Semi-structured interviews with each parent/guardian showed that they all highly valued reading and writing as essential life skills. However, while they viewed literacy as having instrumental value, they also…

Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 minute on Indian education is widely held to be representative of the views which underpinned the English East India Company's replacement of Persian with English as the official language of administration in India in 1837, and the promotion of English and Indian vernacular languages as part of colonial educational…

This article drew on the recent dynamic, distributed view of "translanguaging and flows" and the New Materiality view of meaning making to explore content and language integrated learning (CLIL) activities in an English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) secondary Science classroom. Fine-grained analysis of the multilingual and multimodal…

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 paper proposes a framework for multilingual language-in-education policy implementation, offered as a critically constructive response to India's recent "National Education Policy 2020" (GOI, 2020). Rooted in India's existing educational language policy, our linguistically inclusive 'Languages for Learning' (LFL) framework is, we…

This paper explores language ideology, policies and the role of English in Pakistan and China, two countries in which English plays different roles in education. Owing to globalization and communication development, the role of the English language is changing; thus, there is need to change the policies and ideologies surrounding English…

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…

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…

The paper addresses a key issue in language planning of the third world countries, specifically Pakistan, a country that remained under the shackles of Colonialism till 1947. But, still the country does not have a clear cut language policy. Being richly multilingual and multicultural, it had to cope with the problem of a second language, the…