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…

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…

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…

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…

This paper explores student experiences of language-in-education policies through the lens of colonial processes and traces such logic as they operate through educational institutions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews of high school seniors and recent graduates, I investigate how students in Pakistani secondary schools interact with…

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…

Almost two centuries of British colonial rule in the Asian subcontinent came to an end in 1947 with the creation of a new state named Pakistan and an independent state of India. On 14 August 1947, the state of Pakistan was born primarily as a homeland for Muslims. The Pakistani constitution states that primary education should be free and…

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…

In this study, the researcher explored various aspects of Pakistani undergraduate students' learning experiences in their immediate (both formal and informal) learning context. In addition, the researcher also found out and discussed the possible motivational role of these aspects of participants' immediate learning contexts. This qualitative…

Most refugees in countries of permanent resettlement arrive from first-asylum countries -- countries where refugees initially move to escape crisis in their homelands. Their pre-resettlement educational experiences have largely been undocumented. This qualitative ethnographic study describes the literacy practices of four elementary-aged Afghan…

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship among Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and Mathematical Performance (MP) of a sample of Pakistani students. A quantitative research approach was used to find out participants' WMC and to discover its relationship with their MP. A sample of 1186 participants' from fifty seven public sector…

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…

Dr. Zakir Husain is known as a self-less nationalist leader and also as an educationist "par excellence." Taking a cue from his educational ideas like the "Nai Talim," this article brings into focus his views on the medium-conundrum. Dr. Husain was very clear about the role of Indian languages and the relevance of mother…