Creative Maladjustment and Creative Subversion of Kazakhstan’s English Teachers: Doing Translanguaging in Concealment

Abstract

Kazakhstan’s government has been pushing for English proficiency to become globally competitive. Rhetoric about global competitiveness has resulted in various policies to promote English teaching and learning in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. English has eventually evolved as the language of instruction in many universities. The direct language teaching approach has been the mainstay for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), whereby school administrators do not permit teachers to use the mother tongue. Instead, they are to teach English monolingually. With the monolingual approach to teaching, the teacher does not need to know the local languages of the students and is supposed to be a native speaker or have native-like proficiency in the English language. Most of the English teachers in Kazakhstan are local. This qualitative study explored English teachers’ experiences in elementary and secondary schools in Kazakhstan and how they navigated their daily lives in the classroom teaching EFL. The findings indicated that teachers have long been practicing creative maladjustment and creative subversion by utilizing a translanguaging approach to teaching English without knowing the efficacy of translanguaging in language learning. This article suggests introducing and developing translingual art-based practices for teaching and learning English in Kazakhstan.

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