From Immersion to Submersion: A Case Study of Pakistani Students’ Additive vs. Subtractive Language Learning Experience

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Negotiating Language Ideologies in Linguistically Diverse Settings: Global Perspectives (Table 14)

Abstract

This paper seeks to locate Pakistan’s middle-tier English-medium private schools in the global educational discourse on immersion and submersion. Using qualitative and quantitative data from a case study conducted in Karachi, it highlights the effects of English-medium education on native speakers of the national language, Urdu, among the new middle class. The study findings illustrate the immersive nature of schooling and the importance placed on the English language by key stakeholders, such as administrators, English teachers, and parents, with the majority of surveyed students preferring to do their pleasure reading in English instead of their high-status home language. This heritage loss shows that the students’ initial additive learning experience becomes subtractive due to English’s linguistic imperialism in a postcolonial context.

Author

• Saulat Pervez, International Institute of Islamic Thought