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LEADERSHIP IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION: AN EXPLORATORY EMBEDDED MULTIPLE CASE-STUDY OF HEADS OF DEPARTMENTS IN TWO SCHOOLS IN KAZAKHSTAN
(Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education, 2024-08-02) Badanova, Aisulu
Educational systems around the world are focused on enhancing the quality and equity in education. Kazakhstan, with aspirations to rank among the 30 most developed economies by 2050, recognizes the role of education in developing competitive human capital for economic growth. Thus, the nation initiated rapid educational changes aimed at improving the teaching and learning quality and standards in schools. Despite ongoing decentralization efforts, the Kazakhstani education system remains centralized and bureaucratic due to the legacy of the Soviet era, which is still present in teachers’ memories and professional beliefs, and internal structures of the school system including school administration, leadership and management.
While traditionally, school leadership has been solely associated with school principal, there has been a shift towards more distributed forms of leadership. Middle leaders, particularly heads of departments (HoDs), are well placed in between the policy and practice and teachers and senior leaders. They can play a pivotal role in enacting leadership within schools. Their leadership potential to impact the improvement of teaching and learning practices, contribute to the overall school improvement, and negotiate and interpret school reforms has been increasingly recognized worldwide.
THE SENSE-MAKING AND ENACTMENT OF ENGLISH MEDIUM INSTRUCTION (EMI) POLICY IN A NATIONAL AND A STATE UNIVERSITY IN KAZAKHSTAN: A MULTI-LEVEL, MULTI-ACTOR PERSPECTIVE
(Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education, 2024-09-13) Karabay, Akmaral
The internationalization of universities has led to a significant increase in the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Outer and Expanding Circles. In Kazakhstani HEIs, the implementation of EMI has gained momentum over the past decade following multiple governmental initiatives, references, and policies. However, the EMI policy, like many other reforms in the country, has been predominantly top-down and has not been clearly articulated at the governmental level. When a government initiates such inchoate policy, institutions, as a rule, tend to introduce the policy, ignoring their capacity and/or enacting it substantially based on their own interpretations. Little knowledge exists about the readiness of HEIs to enact EMI policy or their experiences of translating it into practice. Hence, this study explores how the governmental EMI policy is interpreted and enacted in two different types of HEIs located in two regions in Kazakhstan and how the interpretations and enactment practices differ across levels (national, institutional, and classroom) and universities (state and national).
Employing the integrated theoretical lens of Enactment theory (Ball et al., 2012) , the Onion framework (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996), and Language-in-Education Planning (LEP) (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997), the study explores interpretations and enactment processes at multiple levels and from the perspectives of four main groups of policy actors involved in its enactment (EMI managers, heads of departments, faculty members and students). Framed as a qualitative interpretive multiple case study research design, the study utilized governmental and institutional policy documents, alongside views of policy actors gathered through individual interviews and focus group discussions.
The study revealed that policy actors’ interpretations (Chapter 4), framed as governmental, institutional, and individual, are shaped by their role in policy enactment. The policy is largely focused on country at the governmental level, and policy actors’ interpretations are institutionally and individually oriented at the respective levels. As the majority of policy actors support EMI, the governmental framing of EMI within trilingualism policy appears to alleviate resistance towards English. Not only disciplinary differences in EMI interpretations were evident, the analysis also demonstrates that the well-resourced national university has higher expectations from EMI compared to the less-resourced state university. Despite the absence of clear governmental guidelines on institutional policy enactment (Chapter 5), the universities exhibit similar organizational approaches to EMI enactment. Institutional leadership at both universities aims to expand the number of EMI programs, yet concerns at the classroom level center around the quality of EMI delivery due to the lack of thoughtfulness in addressing LEP issues. The classroom level enactment (Chapter 6) also demonstrates little guidance from those at the higher level. The perception of EMI design as a mere language switch is contrasted against the need for methodological changes, suggesting the need for more focused EMI training for faculty members. Overall, the EMI policy in Kazakhstani HEIs demonstrates alignment with broader governmental objectives. However, enactment challenges remain at the institutional and classroom levels. Addressing these challenges requires a nuanced approach to institutional and program planning as well as targeted support for faculty development.
ENGLISH MEDIUM INSTRUCTION POLICY AND PRACTICE IN THE MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT OF A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN KAZAKHSTAN: A QUALITATIVE STUDY
(Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education, 2024-08) Kazhigaliyeva, Aigerim
This thesis presents findings from a qualitative study conducted in one private university in the
city of Astana to examine the English medium instruction policy and practice in the multilingual
context of Kazakhstan. The study was conducted in response to the challenges the universities
reportedly confront regarding the effective implementation of the English Medium Instruction
(EMI) policy, a phenomenon that is relatively recent in the context of Kazakhstan. The focus of
the study was to explore how different stakeholders (administrators, teachers, and students)
understood the EMI policy, what challenges they confronted in its implementation, and the
practices especially those of teachers as to how they manage and negotiate the policy within the
classrooms in day-to-day transactions, and how their teaching and learning approaches
accounted for the local languages and students’ multilingual repertoires. Employing a qualitative
research design, the study used multiple data collection tools that included interviews, classroom
observations, documents analysis, and other relevant sources such as informal conversations with
different stakeholders during the fieldwork, fieldnotes, and an analysis of the linguistic landscape
used within the research site. The findings of the study suggest that the stakeholders’ overall
perspectives about the EMI are positive, thinking of EMI as a move forward towards the future
of the country. EMI, in their view, will not only put Kazakhstan at an economic advantage, but it
will also help Kazakhstani graduates to gain access to all forms of modern knowledge, and thus
become globally competitive. The findings also suggest that brighter hopes and aspirations aside,
the EMI policy still faces numerous challenges in the context. The main challenges include
students’ low English proficiency, teachers’ language proficiency, teachers’ lack of professional
development in the EMI, and the university’s overall preparedness level to meet the EMI
demands in the form of the essential resources such as books, library, online-sources, and access
to the internet. Other important findings suggest that teachers ideologically hold orthodox
monoglossic orientations towards the use of the EMI policy in the classrooms, where they would
ideally like to teach contents through English-only approach, because, as they believe, the use of
the local languages may reduce the quality of an EMI policy. However, the practical challenges
and the contextual linguistic realities make teachers take recourse to the multilingual resources of
the students, because the idealized monoglossic notions of EMI conflict with students’ current
English language proficiency and their readiness to cope with the challenges of the academic
English. Thus, as a forced measure, teachers negotiate the challenges by their recourse to a
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linguistically flexible teaching approach, where they allow for translanguaging practices so that
students can access contents easily and participate effectively in the classroom. Theoretically, the
study concludes that language policy is a complex, dynamic, and multilayered phenomenon. It
does not operate in a linear way, as it is typically understood as either top-down or bottom-up.
Most importantly, the local actors such as students, teachers, and local administrator working at
the micro-level perform more important agentive roles as arbiters and implementors of the
policy. In the end, I recommend that the universities in a context such as Kazakhstan, need to not
only realistically analyze the needs of the EMI policy, the professional development needs of
teachers and students, but also re-envision the EMI policy within the local sociolinguistic
landscape, facilitating a more localized form of EMI, where the local languages and local
multilingualism is utilized as a pedagogical/instructional resource to effectively mediate the EMI
policy, and thus reduce the degree of challenges the English language poses in the context. In
policy terms, this would require both the management and EMI teachers to develop critical
multilingual language awareness.
FORECASTING DEMAND IN RETAIL INDUSTRY USING AUTOREGRESSIVE TECHNIQUES
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2024-04) Bolat, Aitken
This paper aims to compare the accuracy of different forecasting methods in retail industry in Ecuador. In particular, autoregression, autoregressive moving average, vector autoregression, and neural network autoregression were used to predict the demand for three time series. The study used the data provided by “Corporacion Favorita” from Kaggle. The three time series that were used are “automotive”, “dairy” and “beverages” which correspond to the product categories. The study finds that for “dairy” and “beverages” product families autoregressive model is the most accurate, while neural network autoregressive model is the most accurate for the “automotive” category. For the vector autoregressive model price of “Brent” oil was used, but this model was the least accurate. The accuracy of the autoregressive moving average model was in between autoregressive and vector autoregressive models.
CROSSBORDER DIALECT DIFFERENCES AND SPEAKERS PERCEPTIONS: KAZAKH LANGUAGE IN CHINA AND KAZAKHSTAN
(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2024) Bizhanova, Moldir
The Kazakh language is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch and an official
language of Kazakhstan with more varieties spoken by minorities in other countries. My research
focuses on one of such Kazakh varieties spoken in China, with the fieldwork done among the
ethnic Kazakhs born in the Ili region of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
My thesis aims to identify the linguistic differences between the Kazakh spoken in China
and Kazakhstan, and investigate the perceptions and attitudes of ethnic Kazakhs born in China
towards the Kazakh language variations. For that, the study first contrasts phonetic, lexical, and
semantic differences in the spoken Kazakh in China and Kazakhstan based on the audio files
recorded during the fieldwork. Even though similarities exist between spoken Kazakh in China
and regions of Kazakhstan, distinct lexical and dialectical differences are evident based on the
results of my work.
Then based on the interviews conducted with the ethnic Kazakhs from China, my study
reveals attitudes towards the Kazakh language varieties where language ideologies were detected
regarding language purity. It was shown how semiotic processes of language ideologies further
influence the perceptions of the dialect borders in the minds of the speakers