ENGLISH MEDIUM INSTRUCTION POLICY AND PRACTICE IN THE MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT OF A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN KAZAKHSTAN: A QUALITATIVE STUDY
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2024-08
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education
Abstract
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
5
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.
Description
Keywords
EMI, language policy, language practice., Type of access: Gated
Citation
Kazhigaliyeva, A. (2024). 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