Translanguaging and Multilingual Teaching and Writing Practices at a Pakistani University.

Writing challenges, causes, and strategies to facilitate the doctoral dissertation‐writing process: A qualitative analysis

“…These linguistic differences seemingly perpetuate writing challenges for the students in using the distinctive features of English correctly, contextually suitable vocabulary, and grammar. Rafi and Fox (2020 and 2021) have found that Punjabi/Urdu speakers face difficulties, especially in organizing a sentence's structure and marking modality, inserting articles, and prepositions. They further argue that while students translate the assembly line of their thoughts without realizing things may be done differently in the English language, certain cultural expressions tend to overarch their write‐up.…”

“…Although English is a medium of instruction in Pakistani universities, the participants admitted in [11a‐11c] that they failed to acquire the intricacies of advanced academic writing because they were never trained for the analytical thinking required to write a doctoral dissertation. Rafi and Fox (2020 and 2021) critique that irrespective of linguistic and cultural understanding of the target language, the aim of teaching English in Pakistani universities remains on the successful “delivery” of content and assessment. This approach has primarily incorporated rote learning of vocabulary and grammar.…”

“…She has concluded that the linguistic differences between their first language and English may have contributed to their challenges in making their argument clear. In part, Rafi and Fox (2020 and 2021) have found that writing challenges for university‐level learners of English might be attributed to differences between their first language and English. Furthermore, they have revealed a lack of several writing tendencies and understanding of specific vocabulary usage and terminology, sense relation and meaning, specified collocations, and complex grammatical relations, which might result in doctoral students' writing difficulties.…”

“…The quality of doctoral students’ writing came up so frequently in the literature (see e.g., Abdu Saeed and Ghazali 2018; Abdu Saeed, Al‐Ahdal, and Al Qunayeer 2020) that it deserves special attention. While past studies are devoted to the lack of academic writing instructions (Odena and Burgess 2017; Harrison, Trudgett, and Page 2017; Graham 2018; Ma 2020), first‐language interference (Rafi and Fox 2020 and Rafi and Fox 2021; Paltridge and Starfield 2020; Ma 2020), lack of critical reading (Bosley 2008; Ciampa and Wolfe 2020), argumentative writing (Andrews 2007; Imtiaz and Mahmood 2014; Faize 2015; Wentzel 2018), and examiners’ cultural biases (Harrison, Trudgett, and Page 2017), the present study aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on doctoral dissertation writing. Although the existing literature as cited above explores doctoral dissertation‐writing problems and facilitating strategies based on a small sample size of students from various disciplines and contexts, there is a need to theorize the writing humps, causes, and strategies in a particular discipline from multiple perspectives and data sets.…”

Digital Pakistan in COVID-19: rethinking language use at social media platforms

“…Moreover, the translanguaging model shows that people follow translingual practices to introduce new concepts and ideas that for Valdés (1981) is a "rational choice" of people, while Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai (2001) consider it as a personal "choice" where people excludes certain items from their interactions to recall proper lexical items during communication and to impress others. The translanguaging model has been modified and exploited by various researchers by focusing on classroom environment, educational spheres, and impacts of translanguaging in their English medium classrooms (Omar, 2007;Jorgensen and Fenger, 2008;Li and Zhu, 2013;Conteh, 2018;Rafi and Fox, 2020;Zahra et al, 2020;Ali, 2021;Hussain and Khan, 2021) but missed a chance to explore these practices on a digital platform in Pakistan. To fill the gap, this article will focus on the current phenomenon that remains unexplored in the Pakistani digital landscape.…”