Doing English-Only Instructions: A Multimodal Account of Bilingual Bangladeshi Classrooms

The research reported here is part of a broader research project on bilingual Bangladeshi ESL schools. The study seeks to find out how a prescribed language policy that is operating at the school informs classroom instruction. To do so, it uses the distinction between medium of instruction and medium of interaction, introduced by Bonacina & Gafaranga (2011), to examine how participants to instructional exchanges orient their actions to the language policy as well as to locally emerging interactional challenges. Through multimodal conversation analysis the study shows how participants sustain, suppress or even overlook the medium of instruction in the service of doing instruction. These findings therefore contribute to the existing literature on language policy-in-practice and language alternation in bilingual classrooms.