Higher education offered by the private sector in Bangladesh is heavily based on English medium instruction (World Bank, 2019; Sultana, 2014) in which the use of the mother tongue is discouraged and only English is encouraged to impart education. At private universities in Bangladesh, the emphasis on English as the only medium of instruction is still prevailing despite the inflow of more students with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) backgrounds. The English-only policy and learning experiences of students of the private universities in Bangladesh have been found as "not so rewarding for all the students" (Sultana, 2014, p. 14). Agency has been conceptualized as a social as well as a cognitive construct in language policy and planning research (Canagarajah, 1999; Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008; Hamid & Nguyen, 2016). Teng (2019, p. 78), however, considers "agency" as a "system of socially mediated autonomy". In bi-/multilingual education and policy research, the concept of agency of major individual actors such as teachers and learners is crucial in the understanding of macro-micro relationships in policymaking. There are, however, gaps in areas of research that require studies on how teachers and learners activate their agentive roles in bilingual pedagogical practices which facilitate or hinder learning in specific contexts such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Broadly, drawing on Teng's (2019) model of agency and based on the qualitative case studies of 5 teachers and 5 students of EAP writing courses at a Bangladeshi private university, this presentation will shed light on the significance of the agencies of individual local actors to opt for or reject bilingual practices in the enactment of the institutional language policy in a particular sociocultural context of English language learning. The purpose of this presentation is to show how teachers and EFL learners struggle to enact an English-only policy in EAP writing courses at a private university in Bangladesh and how they face such challenges through their bilingual practices in classrooms. The goal of the presentation is to propose a balanced bilingual policy for English Language Teaching in higher education in Bangladesh based on the reasoning why it is high time to implement the multilingual TESOL in practice in English language teaching contexts in higher education in Bangladesh.
References
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Hamid, M. O., & Nguyen, H. T. M. (2016). Globalization, English language policy and
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Liddicoat, A. J., & Baldauf, R. B., Jr. (Eds.). (2008). Language planning in local contexts.
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Sultana, S. (2014). English as a Medium of Instruction in Bangladesh's Higher Education:
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Teng, M. F. (2019). Autonomy, Agency, and Identity in Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. Singapore: Springer.
World Bank. (2019). Bangladesh Tertiary Education Sector Review: Skills and Innovation
for Growth. Washington DC: The World Bank.
