Collaboration, Empowerment, Education, and Action: Kazakhstan's Teachers’ Creative Maladjustment in Utilizing Translanguaging as a Pedagogical Strategy

Abstract

The four concepts that form the first tier of the title of this article—collaboration, empowerment, education, and action—are four crucial tenets of participatory action research (PAR). Over the past three decades, efforts to enhance English teaching as a foreign language have expanded significantly in Kazakhstan, as the government has advocated for English proficiency to improve the country's global competitiveness. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Education and Science regulations require teachers to teach English as the sole language of instruction. However, most English teachers in Kazakhstan, instead of adhering to the rule of teaching English monolingually, employ creative maladjustment and subversion by using their discretion to shift between languages during English lessons. This study aims to explore teachers’ practices of creative maladjustment and creative subversion and to utilize participatory action research (PAR) to empower teachers to set priorities for using translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). The findings indicated that teachers have practiced creative maladjustment and creative subversion in their teaching practices; they do not obey the Ministry's monolingual regulation and have been shifting between languages when teaching English, utilizing a translingual approach. Since teachers indicated empowerment in utilizing translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy in their classrooms, there is no going back to the obsolete practice of monolingual teaching. We recommend that the government rescind the rule of teaching English monolingually and institute professional development strategies that will introduce and develop translingual art-based procedures for teaching and learning English in Kazakhstan.

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