From colonial celebration to postcolonial performativity: ‘guilty multilingualism’ and ‘performative agency’ in the English Medium Instruction (EMI) context

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reports data from a qualitative study conducted within the elitist English-medium schools in three cities of Pakistan to claim that theory building, and English teaching practices are still modeled on monolingual biases inherent in the orthodox notions of linguistic purism and Anglo-normative traditions of the 1990s. Orthodoxy is manifest in schools’ strong emphasis on direct method and communicative language teaching, and essentialist language management where English is enforced as the sole legitimate language of academic and non-academic transactions. Native language use is attached a stigma and viewed as deficiency in the English language. Such Anglo-normative culture invokes guilty conscience in teachers and students as they disapprove native languages even when they know that they can serve as useful meditating tools for effective content transfer. Crucially, amid English gatekeepers’ celebratory attitudes toward English as the sole legitimate language, some teachers still demonstrate deviation from the pervasive linguistic norms. Showing reflexivity and agency, these teachers ideologically oppose the official policy. They discursively generate spaces for negotiating and appropriating the official policies, which signifies that language policy can be a complex multi-layered process rather than a linear, discrete, or top-down phenomenon. Teachers’ agency is interpreted as ‘decolonial performativity’.