Beliefs of English Language Teachers about Multilingual Pedagogy and Their Teaching Practices: A Case of a School for Gifted Students

Abstract

In an attempt to increase the international competitiveness of Kazakhstan through its human capital, the Trilingual Education (TL) Policy, highlighting the country’s three languages, English, Kazakh, and Russian, was inaugurated in 2007 (MoES, 2011). This policy triggered the need to adopt the best pedagogical practices possible in the secondary education sector. Accordingly, the government has called on teachers to implement multilingual (ML) pedagogical practices. As its language policy involves languages of different origins, Kazakhstan could be considered a multilingual environment. However, societal attitudes that attribute certain statuses to different languages (Borg, 2003) may influence educators’ beliefs about ML pedagogy as well as impact their teaching practices. In their turn, teachers’ beliefs may influence the way various languages are viewed in schools. Therefore, the present study aims to explore English language (EL) teachers’ beliefs about ML pedagogy and its influence on their teaching practices. As a case study, a qualitative research design applying a semi-structured interview was conducted to explore this phenomenon at a school for gifted students. The data was collected from five secondary school English teachers. The findings revealed that the majority of these EL teachers opt for monoglossic approaches and prioritize English-only instruction due to their stances that the English language should be taught in English. However, due to their students’ low language proficiency, the teachers are incapable of implementing that monolingual instruction. Thus, they switch to such heteroglossic approaches as translanguaging. Nevertheless, adopting such approaches are not the priority of these teachers due to their aspirations to utilize monoglossic methods. The findings of this research might contribute to the body of literature by filling some gaps in multilingual educational research. They may also help teachers to review their beliefs about ML pedagogy and their actual teaching practices, as well as aid policymakers to evaluate the effectiveness of the TL Education policy.