Negotiating Linguistic Identity in Multilingual Classroom: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

The study scrutinizes how multilingual learners negotiate their linguistic identities in Pakistani multilingual classrooms, where institutional monolingual norms frequently clash with students’ diverse linguistic realities. For theoretical underpinning, Bonny Norton’s theory of Investment (2013), García’s standpoint on translanguaging (2013) and Bourdieu notion of Linguistic Capital (1991) have been exploited to analyze reflective narratives; uncovering the lived experiences of minoritized students (from a public college). In classroom settings, their native languages are affirmed, adapted or repressed during peer-group interactions that’s why the personal retrospective narratives of the participants, in the form of semi structured interviews assisted in analyzing internal linguistic affiliations and preferences in academic spaces that have direct influence on identity construction. For deductive thematic analysis that is a top -down approach for analysis, Nvivo software has been employed to generate themes related to the predefined theoretical framework. The results of the narratives explored all the agentic strategies such as translanguaging, code-mixing, code-switching as an active form of resistance against the monolingual pedagogical practices that are in voyage; claiming their unique voices and reclaiming the non-material cultural nuances of the marginalized past under the subjugation of the colonizers. In this way, ESL learners exhibited a sense of self-authorship, critical thinking and self-valuation on higher academic landscape. The narratives reflected that their multilingual repertoire can be beneficial for their cognitive build-up rather than being a deficit capital.  In due course, this article propagates a critical tanslanguaging pedagogical stance, rejecting the pre-existing subtractive monolingual language teaching practices. This research offers an actionable plan for language instructors, administrators of institutions, researchers, policy makers and higher academic stakeholders to see linguistic diversity as a positive gesture which can prove to be a cognitive leverage for ESL learners in multilingual classroom setting and learner can boast up their identities instead of being ashamed and silenced.