CORRELATING PEDAGOGICAL TRANSLANGUAGING PRACTICES WITH MULTILINGUAL IDENTITY AFFIRMATION: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF TERTIARY LEVEL ESL CLASSROOMS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

In spite of the linguistic diversity in Pakistan, in most of the ESL (English as a Second Language) tertiary classrooms, the monolingual policies are applied. This ideology of English can devalue students' home languages and can disrupt students' bilingual identity. To fill the deficit of empirical studies of inclusive language practices in this context, this quantitative, cross-sectional correlational study examined the correlation between pedagogical translanguaging and affirming multilingual identity by undergraduate ESL students from Pakistan. Data were gathered from three questionnaires namely adapted Pedagogical Translanguaging Questionnaire (PTQ) and Multilingual Identity Affirmation Scale (MIAS) using a stratified random sample of public and private universities in Pakistan (N=398). Both classroom translanguaging (M = 3.65) and the self-reported identity affirmation (M = 3.88) had a moderate to high frequency. The inferential statistical analysis showed a high and significant positive correlation between pedagogical translanguaging and identity affirmation with a value of r(396) = .68, p < .001. Additionally, the results of simple linear regression showed that the determination coefficient of translanguaging practices was 46.3% (R^2 = .463) which meant that the translanguaging practices could explain 46.3% of the variance in multilingual identity affirmation. The results are empirical and disprove of the traditional English only approaches and paradigms, demonstrating that the systematic validation of the student's full language system has a strong psychological impact which significantly increases students' confidence and cultural pride in the academic environment. The study strongly recommends to formally include translanguaging pedagogies in the tertiary ESL curriculum in Pakistan.