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Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongoliatwo countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian peripherythis paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful stylization and reconfiguration of what the local means. On the other hand, they engage in stylization and reflexive language use, often involving exaggerated linguistic variation, mixing, and other semiotic resources in order to produce and perform a range of social and cultural identities. The paper hence shows how the circulation and takeup of popular cultural flows around Asia can involve diverse processes of linguistic and cultural stylization.

The translingual practices of young Mongolians and Bangladeshis suggest that contrary to those popular discourses which position youth as passive recipients of global culture, these young adults are better understood as actively and powerfully engaged with popular culture productions. Drawing on the examples of casual offline conversations and online Facebook interactions of university students in Mongolia and Bangladesh, this paper shows how processes of relocalization give new meanings to the translingual practices of these students as they draw on different modalities from popular culture (film, music and so on) and different linguistic and nonlinguistic resources. This transtextual and transmodal analysis enables us to show how these young adults relocalize linguistic and cultural resources in both their on- and offline interactions.

It is commonly assumed in the print media that bilingual young adults in Bangladesh are subjugated by the colonial legacy of English and they are 'polluting' Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, by their indiscriminate insertion of English in it. However, this ethnographic study on a group of young adults in a university in Bangladesh shows that this assumption is simplistic and inadequate. A close linguistic analysis of extracts from their face-to-face and virtual conversations on Facebook illustrates that they (1) use linguistic and semantic forms of both English and Bangla very creatively, strategically and pragmatically, (2) bring in diversity to Bangla not only from English but also from different genre of discourses, and eventually (3) transgress the boundary of the Bangla language. English in fact provides them with newer metalinguistic and indexical opportunities. The study also identifies that the nationalist stance in favour of Bangla may not allow a fuller appreciation of the complex linguistic scenario in Bangladesh. At the end, the study suggests a prospect of a future research that may provide important insights into the socio-cultural dynamics of bilingualism in English and Bangla in the social landscape of Bangladesh as well as in other multilingual contexts.

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The wellbeing of teachers and students has emerged as a common concern in research studies in recent times, specifically during the critical period of COVID-19. Based on the findings drawn from the qualitative data through focus group discussions of five groups of teachers (16 females and 8 males) and students (10 males and nine females) at the tertiary level of education in Bangladesh, this paper shows that online teaching during COVID-19 is affected by personal and social challenges, and consequently, both teachers and students experience anxieties and stresses. Teachers are anxious because of the university authorities' surveillance, frequent pay cuts, and fear of losing jobs due to students' low enrollment in universities. They also suffer from physical discomforts, such as back pain, blur vision, and headache because of the prolonged engagement with online activities. Students, especially those from a non-privileged background located in peripheral rural contexts, seem to suffer more from contextual realities that are non-conducive for technology-based learning. Increased numbers and various forms of online assessments also seem to become a burden for them. In general, educational experiences of online teaching seemed to have a peripheral role in their conceptualization of wellbeing. The paper concludes that the insurmountable attention given to online pedagogic practices across the world needs to be balanced out by an equal effort in improving the wellbeing of both teachers and students.

With the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and disruption of the education systems worldwide, private universities in Bangladesh transitioned to online classes to ensure continuity of education. Therefore, it was important to investigate the private university teachers’ and students’ perceptions regarding various dimensions of accessing online instruction and coping strategies used by teachers. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect data from 208 teachers and 674 students through questionnaires and focus group discussions. The findings indicate that teachers and students encountered several barriers, including unstable internet connection, costly internet packages, minimal support for teachers, issues with online assessment, and an unsuitable home environment. To combat existing problems related to assessment and to increase interaction in the classroom, teachers used a small range of coping strategies. Measures are suggested to ensure access to stable internet connectivity, financial support to students and teacher training on online pedagogy and assessment.