Ongoing projects
1. The Case for Using L1 to Explore ESL Students’ Intersectional Identities and Experiences
(2022-2023)
PI: Dr. Rahat Zaidi
Co-I: Dr. Pramod Sah
Collaborator: Michelle Veroba
Summary of the project:
The study focuses on a rural high school in Western Canada, whose surrounding community, through business and economic initiatives, has been effectively transformed by a relatively recent influx of newcomers. As a result, the host community is faced with the challenge to ensure the children of these new families experience a smooth and equitable transition to schools. In Canada, one of the primary challenges is to help these students learn the L2 (either English or French) to be able to integrate into mainstream education and society which, in most cases, is a predictor of their successful social and economic integration. This school, with approximately 35% visible minority students of whom 80% are Black, is trying to juggle the relationship its students have between language, race, culture, and religion and the expectations being placed on the students and the stakeholders (teachers, administration, parents) in their education journey. Within this process, students’ intersectional identities (the intersection of race, language, culture, and religion) not only influence their learning but also create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. Furthermore, their arrival to the new homelands is messy and often entangled with various emotions (e.g., stress, anxiety, and fear). Consequently, this leaves them (re)negotiating, and resisting certain identities in the reciprocity of learning the L2.
The project will document the ways newcomer students construct, (re)negotiate, and resist their intersectional identities in the process of learning English (L2). It will also showcase the extent to which they articulate their sense of identity through community and school interactions. This includes an understanding of the ways their home language, culture, and religion influence (English) language learning and integration into the mainstream Canadian education system. This will underscore the necessity for newcomer students to explore and understand the juxtaposition of the linguistic and cultural obstacles with the assets they have as they build their life in a new homeland. The research also takes into account the responsibilities of the stakeholders in this journey, including teachers, administration, parents, and their peers and the role that they can play in ensuring their academic success. The scholarship is guided by two questions:
- What role does the L1 play in developing an understanding of intersectionality and learning of the L2?
- To what extent do newcomer youth articulate a sense of identity through community and school interactions in relation to the process of learning the L2?
Completed Projects
1. English-Medium Education in Low and Middle Income Contexts: Enabler or Barrier to Gender Equality
(2022-2023)
This research project has been funded (£100,000) by the British Council to study the impact of English-medium education (EME) on gender equality in low and middle-income countries.
The project will build an understanding of the relationship between the language of instruction and gender inequality, about which there is currently insufficient research. The researchers will also investigate schools in two Muslim communities in Nigeria and Nepal to examine the specific impact on girls from these minoritised groups most vulnerable to social exclusion.
Link to the news
Publications out of the project
Hultgren, A. K., Upadhaya, A., O’Hagan, L., Wingrove, P., Adamu, A., Greenfield, M., Lombardozzi, L., Sah, P. K., Tsiga, I. A., Umar, A., & Wolfenden, F. (2023). Educación en inglés y la perpetuación de la desigualdad de las niñas inversión parental y aspiraciones de género en Nepal [English-medium education and the perpetuation of girls’ disadvantage: Parental investment and gendered aspirations in Nepal]. Cuadernos de Pedagogia, 543, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=9021887#
2. New Hierarchies, New Middle Class: A Critical Ethnography of English as a Medium of Instruction Policy in Nepal’s Public Schools
(2016-2021)
This was my Ph.D. research, funded by the Killam Trust Canada.
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.
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 and its 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 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 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 privatization in public education 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 new 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 the 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.
Publications out of the project
Sah, P. K. (2023). Emotions as entanglements: Unpacking teachers’ emotion management and policy negotiation in English-medium instruction programmes. The Language Learning Journal, 51(5) https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2023.2243954.
Sah, P. K. (2022). English as a medium of instruction, social stratification and symbolic violence in Nepali schools: untold stories of Madhesi children. In L. Adinolfi, U. Bhattacharya, & P. Phyak (eds.), Multilingual education in South Asia: At the intersection between policy and practice (pp. 50-68). Routledge.
Phyak, P., & Sah, P. K. (2022). Epistemic injustice and neoliberal imaginations in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy. Applied Linguistics Review. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2022-0070
3. English-Medium Instruction in Nepal’s Higher Education
(2021-2022)
This study was designed to document the experiences of students and instructors in EMI programs in various disciplines. The study took place at three colleges in Kathamndu that ran programs in Education, Business Studies, Nursing, and Pharmacy. The included interviews and focus group discussions with students and instructors.
Publications out of the project
Sah, P. K. (2023). Emotion and imagination in English-medium instruction programs: Illuminating its dark side through Nepali students’ narratives. Linguistics and Education, 75, Article 101150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2023.101150
Sah, P. K. (forthcoming). Teacher language ideologies and practices in implementing English-medium instruction.
Sah, P. K. (2022). English medium instruction as neoliberalism endowment in Nepal’s higher education: Policy-shaping practices. In N. Galloway & J. McKinley (eds.), English-medium instruction practices in higher education: International perspectives (pp. 71-83). Bloomsbury.
4. Teacher Language Ideology of Emergent Bilingual Students’ Use of Home Languages in the U.S.
(2020-2021)
Co-PI: Dr. Huseyin Uysal
This study was designed to understand the beliefs of content-area subject teachers toward emergent bilingual students’ home language use in secondary schools in the United States. The study involved interviews with two content-area subject teachers and observations of their engagement in workshops focused on the professional development of in-service teachers.
Publications out of the project
Sah, P. K. & Uysal, H. (2022). Unbiased but ideologically unclear: Teacher beliefs about language practices of emergent bilingual students in the U.S. Linguistics and Education, 72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101126
Dr. Pramod K. Sah 