Language and equality inside the classroom

Abstract Situated within the context of escalating student mobility from rural to urban locales, resulting in multilingual tertiary-level classrooms in Pakistan, this investigation addresses the challenges faced by students coming from diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds. Such students, having encountered minimal exposure to English and Urdu during their school education, encounter obstacles in an English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) setting. While the pedagogical approach of translanguaging has received substantial attention in global multilingual classroom contexts, its exploration within local frameworks such as Pakistan remains delimited. This empirical inquiry delves into the linguistic challenges experienced by tertiary level students from Humanities regarding classroom participation, alongside teachers’ integration of the translanguaging approach. Employing a qualitative methodology encompassing non-participatory observations and interviews, the study investigates multifaceted challenges, encompassing vocabulary comprehension, inadequate explication of scientific terms, lack of fluency in the target language, and the marginalisation of those possessing less English and Urdu proficiencies. Although glimpses of translanguaging strategies are visible, their systematic application is conspicuous by its scarcity, primarily attributed to instructors’ lack of awareness and training concerning students’ entire linguistic resource utilisation. The study underscores the importance of acknowledging linguistic capital disparities, recommending the establishment of an inclusive classroom ecology as well as transformative translanguaging pedagogy training to embrace linguistic diversity and create an inclusive learning environment.