Beauty Secrets and Translanguaging Pedagogies: A Research Story

The Center for Language Studies (CLS), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh organized an online webinar titled “Beauty secrets and translanguaging pedagogies: A research story” on 26 August, 2021. This webinar was conducted by Abu Saleh Mohammad Rafi, a sessional academic, teacher-educator and doctoral research candidate in Linguistics at James Cook University, Australia. It focused on the findings and experiences from his forthcoming publication titled “Translanguaging as a transformative act in a reading classroom: Perspectives from a Bangladeshi private university”. He described how translanguaging pedagogies enabled a group of Bangladeshi students to examine the colonial construction of beauty standards in their society and transformed their knowledge and subjectivities about such standards into a more inclusive concept. The session compared translanguaging pedagogies with the existing English medium instruction to assist the participants to make an informed judgment about languaging practices in their classroom environment. Audience of this webinar involved teachers and researchers from different parts of the world. Dr. Obaidul Hamid, University of Queensland, Australia participated in the question-answer session and shed light on the negative impact of EMI and the importance of theoretical foundation and empirical evidence that show the positive impact of translanguaging on learners. On the other hand, Dr. Shaila Sultana, Advisor, CLS, reflected on the importance of challenging the biases of monolingual speakers for successfully immersing translanguaging pedagogy in higher education. The session ended with the concluding remarks of CLS coordinator Ms. Razia Sultana who identified translanguging as a powerful tool for EFL/ESL classroom. A recording of this webinar is available on the Facebook page of the Center for Language Studies.