Beyond the Policy Ban: Translanguaging Practices in Pakistani English-Medium Instruction Classrooms

Abstract

Pakistan's English-medium instruction (EMI) policies typically mandate English-only classroom interaction, yet classroom realities across universities and colleges often diverge sharply from this monolingual ideal, with teachers and students routinely drawing on Urdu and regional languages to negotiate meaning, manage comprehension, and maintain rapport. This study examines translanguaging practices in Pakistani EMI classrooms, investigating how teachers and students actually navigate English-Urdu-regional language switching in everyday instruction despite formal policy prohibitions against it. Adopting a qualitative, classroom-based ethnographic approach, the research combines non-participant classroom observation across three university departments, audio-recorded lesson excerpts, and follow-up interviews with 12 instructors and 18 students to document the functions, patterns, and pedagogical rationale behind translanguaging moments. Findings reveal that translanguaging most frequently served content clarification and comprehension-checking functions, followed by classroom management, peer negotiation of meaning, rapport-building, and identity marking, with teachers and students alike expressing a persistent disjuncture between official monolingual policy discourse and the multilingual reality of everyday classroom interaction. The study explores this disjuncture between top-down monolingual policy discourse and bottom-up multilingual classroom practice, asking how translanguaging serves as a scaffold for content comprehension, identity affirmation, and classroom management, while also considering the tensions and stigma teachers and students associate with departing from English-only norms. By foregrounding lived classroom practice over stated policy, this research contributes to translanguaging theory in South Asian higher education contexts and offers implications for more linguistically realistic EMI policy design in Pakistan.