Pramod Kumar Sah will have his dissertation defense at 9:00 AM on Monday, May 2nd, 2022 in Zoom. The examination is closed to the public.
The examination committee comprises:
Research Supervisor: Dr. Guofang Li (LLED)
Supervisory Committee Members: Dr. Ryuko Kubota (LLED) and Dr. Jim Anderson (LLED).
University Examiners: Dr. Mark Turin (Department of Anthropology) and Dr. Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education).
External Examiner: Dr. Obaid Hamid (The University of Queensland, Australia).
Chair of the Defense: Dr. Shauna Butterwick (Department of Educational Studies).
New hierarchies, new elites: A critical ethnography of English as a medium of instruction policy in Nepali public schools.
Abstract:
Despite continued calls for the “multi/plural turn” (Kubota, 2016a; May, 2014) for instructional practices and “linguistic human rights” for education through mother tongue (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988), there is currently a global surge of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in school education that situates English in a dominant position. This study is motivated by such a widespread of EMI in Nepal, a multilingual and multiethnic country.
Guided by the theory of “Critical Language Policy Studies” (Hymes, 1964; Tollefson, 2006), this study explores the development and enactment of EMI policy at Nepal’s public schools and what such policy practices mean for diverse students along the lines of language, ethnicity, and social class. I used “critical ethnography” (Anderson, 1989) and “critical policy analysis” (Diem et al., 2014; Taylor, 1997) as research methods to provide a holistic and thick understanding of the EMI policy development and implementation in Nepal. The data were gathered through participant observations of EMI lessons, interviews with policymakers, school administrators, teachers, parents, focus group interviews with students, field notes, and collection of written artifacts.
The findings demonstrated how EMI has evolved as a de facto medium-of-instruction policy through the state’s hidden agendas of envisioning education as a service industry, eventually creating a discourse of privatization at the macro level that favors EMI. Aligning with the macro-level discourses, meso level policy agents (e.g., parents and students) have been socialized into “neoliberal imaginations” (Abbinnett, 2021) of EMI to enter the middle-class identity, which has become a founding ideology to support the growth of EMI in Nepali public schools. At the micro-level, through the mechanism of EMI, the school has served as a reproducer of social class and language hierarchy. The results further showed how EMI practices without planning and prerequisites (e.g., qualified teachers) resulted in poverty of content learning and, therefore, epistemic inequalities. The classroom discourse analysis further revealed how teachers carried an agentic role to scaffold the limited English proficiency of their students by using Nepali (a dominant national language) as a supplementary language, yet perpetuated unequal languaging in the absence of students’ mother tongue. Together, these findings indicate a caution against a rush to policy overhaul to EMI in low- and middle-income multilingual countries.