TRANSLANGUAGING AS TEACHER AGENCY: NEGOTIATING MULTILINGUAL PEDAGOGY IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH-MEDIUM HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

This article examines translanguaging as a form of agency within an English-medium higher education institution in Pakistan. Employing a qualitative narrative-ethnographic case-study design, it triangulates classroom observations, teacher and administrator interviews, fieldnotes, and institutional perspectives. The analysis identifies 15 situated practices influenced by teachers' experiences, beliefs, language ideologies, disciplinary aims, and the affordances and constraints of English-medium instruction EMI. Teachers use multilingual and semiotic resources to establish rapport, provide conceptual scaffolding, gain attention, elaborate meaning, dialogue, reinforce, clarify tasks, negotiate meaning, formatively assess, give feedback, manage the classroom, and support multimodal learning. The results indicate that teacher translingual agency is not binary: English remains valid as a discipline and as a professional language, and familiar linguistic and semiotic resources are used to access concepts, participate, interact, and affect. Agency is afforded more room in lower-stakes, formative environments and is curtailed as assessments move closer to summative, formal, English-oriented assessment. Translanguaging is thus not just an intrinsically good practice, but one that is mediated by the appropriateness of the concepts, mutual intelligibility, purpose of the task, teacher assessment, and institutional demands. In sum, teacher translingual agency is revealed as a contextualized and relational process whereby multilingual resources are strategically managed in the institutional hierarchy of EMI.