The Use of a Multilingual Approach in Supporting Students’ Conceptual Clarity at the Primary Level: A Qualitative Study of Teachers’ Perspectives in District Mardan

Abstract

This article is a qualitative sample study to investigate the understanding and application of a multilingual approach in promoting conceptual clarity among students by primary school teachers in District Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The language environment of Pakistan places a large number of children who speak the Pashto language at a disadvantage in acquiring academic information in the Urdu and English languages that they do not have early fluency in. Informed by the sociocultural and Translanguaging theory, the paper analyzes semi-structured interview and thematic analyses of lived classroom experiences of teachers. The review contextualizes these experiences in the context of international and local literature on multilingual education, language of instruction, and conceptual development. The article summarizes that the multilingual activities of teachers, though mainly informal and self-motivated can be broadly construed as beneficial to the students conceptual mastery, which has implications to teacher training and language-in-education policy.