Dr Raqib Chowdhury

Dr Raqib Chowdhury taught English literature at the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) from 1997 to 2004 as Lecturer and Assistant Professor, and then joined the Monash Faculty of Education upon completing his PhD here in 2008.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in English, a Master’s degree in English Literature and a Master’s degree in Education (TESOL). In his doctoral thesis he investigated how vested interest groups – such as universities and governments – construct and understand the term ‘international’ to establish the so-called ‘needs’ of international students in Australia and how such understanding is promoted for largely implicit commercial and hegemonic reasons. He is author of Desiring TESOL and International Education: Market Abuse and Exploitation (Multilingual Matters, 2014) and has published widely in the areas of TESOL and ELT, culture and pedagogy, English teacher education, international education, social justice and identity. Raqib has been invited as Keynote Speaker and Visiting Scholar at several international conferences and universities and he delivers seminars and workshops overseas for graduate research students on a regular basis.

His recent edited books are Engaging in Educational Research: Revisiting Policy and Practice in Bangladesh (Springer, 2018), Equity, Identity and Social Justice in Asia Pacific Education (Monash University Publishing, 2019), and Transformation and Empowerment through Education: Reconstructing Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2019). His latest book is The Privatisation of Higher Education in Postcolonial Bangladesh: The Politics of Intervention and Control (Routledge, 2021).

Raqib received two Monash University Vice-Chancellor’s Social Inclusion Awards in 2010 (Winner) and 2011 (Commendation), as well as the Dean’s Award for Programs That Enhance Learning in 2012. In 2003 he won the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research Publication in the Faculty of Arts, Dhaka University, where he was teaching at the time.

Raqib has supervised 10 PhD students to completion and is currently supervising 11. He is involved in a number of international collaborative projects involving Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and China on the themes of higher education reform, teacher training and professional development, and research capacity building.

Towards Heteroglossic Bilingual Education –
Implications for Teaching English in Vietnam

Raqib Chowdhury
Faculty of Education, Monash University
raqib.chowdhury@monash.edus

Abstract

Thanks to advances in neuroscience and digital technologies, reductive monoglossic views of bilingualism and bilingual education have long given way to a more holistic understanding of the value of learning multiple languages. Yet, despite the obvious benefits of a heteroglossic approach to language education – which views a speaker’s linguistic repertoire as inseparable – in practice, monoglossic language ideologies continue to shape both foreign language teaching and language policy reforms in many countries, including in Vietnam. Language teachers – as much as policy makers – still often resort to a monolingual mindset that sidelines the value of dynamic bilingualism. Such discrepancy between predominantly monolingual institutional policies and practices, and the multilingual realities of our classrooms, especially in countries where English is the main foreign language, can have a profound effect on the learning of students. This presentation critically considers some of the latest research on the benefits of heteroglossic bilingual education, including the value of bilingual instruction, traslanguaging and own language use, multiple literacies, and how all of this can inform a more sensitive and respectful approach to teaching English as an International (rather than foreign) language. It presents the heteroglossic approach to bilingualism as an alternative that has the potential to facilitate ideological spaces from which aspiring and emergent bilinguals can speak from, while also upholding their linguistic and cultural identities. In particular, it discusses the practicalities of aiming to achieve the dual objectives of linguistic development and cognitive competence in content areas by adopting a language-across-the-curriculum orientation.
Keywords: bilingualism, linguistic repertoire, heteroglossia, plurilingualism, translanguaging, EIL