A Kazakhstani English Language teacher’s perspective on multilingual practices

Abstract

Kazakhstan is now embracing a trilingual education policy through the use of Kazakh, Russian, and English as mediums of instruction. The policy expects multilingual practices from the teachers of content disciplines; however, the same cannot be said for English language teachers. English language teachers are still trapped in English-only practices, making them rely on only the target language when teaching. I, as a Kazakhstani teacher who worked in a trilingual school, decided to challenge this monolingual perspective and try to incorporate multilingual practices into my teaching. In this article, I present my reflections on my past and current teaching beliefs and propose that multilingual practices in the form of pedagogical translanguaging can be seen as legitimate teaching strategies that can be part of ELT classrooms.