Top-Down English Policy and Bottom-Up Teacher Take: An Interview-Based Insight from the Balochistan Province of Pakistan

Provinces in Pakistan have initiated teaching English as a compulsory subject in Grade 1 onwards in their government schools by following the latest National Education Policy (NEP) of 2009. The policy states that the measure shall develop the students’ English proficiency that would later help them compete. In this study we intended to understand whether the policy was implemented successfully in the province of Balochistan. By drawing upon the language planning framework proposed by Kaplan, Baldauf, and Kamwangamalu (2011) and applying convenient sampling technique, the researchers conducted thirty-one semi-structured interviews with urban and rural male and female teachers who teach in Grades 1 to 5. We found that issues such as limited teaching time for the English subject, lack of qualified teachers, inappropriate English textbooks, teachers’ customary teaching methodology, paucity of resources, and gap between policymakers and practitioners impacted the policy. The study offers recommendations that could help the Pakistani policymakers to align the policy with practice, research, and the teachers’ voices in order to achieve the desired outcomes

Language Shift and Ethnic Identity: Focus on Malaysian Sindhis

This paper focusses on the minority community of the Malaysian Sindhis to show that ethnic and cultural identities can be constructed through means other practices than solely by the heritage languages. The study draws on an open-ended question directed to 79 lady members of the Sindhi community in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The respondents were women aged 50-70 and a friend of a friend helped in obtaining further respondents. This age group was selected as they often met for kitty parties, gambling sessions, and lunch parties. Their one-word responses were recorded and returned to the facilitator helping in data collection. The question was “What do you mean when you say you are a Sindhi?”. Based on the data, we contend that the term ethnicity denotes a subjective sense of community, meaning a shared identity which results in a sense of group solidarity. Identity is rooted in actual cultural practices and experiences