A Multimodal Analysis of Language Policy as Practice: The Case of Two English-Medium Schools in Bangladesh

This chapter discusses the ‘practiced language policy’ (Bonacina-Pugh, Language Policy 11:213–234, 2012; Bonacina-Pugh, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23:434–448, 2020;) in two English-medium schools in Bangladesh. English-medium schooling has a significant following in Bangladesh despite a lack of a top-down prescribed policy. Drawing on a corpus of video recordings of two English-medium schools in two metropolitan cities in Bangladesh, this chapter aims to unravel the practiced language policy at play in these two contexts. Through a Multimodal Analysis of this corpus of interactions, I explore the role of multimodal actions in the way classroom participants organise practiced language policies. I argue that multimodal resources are pervasive, but hierarchical, as they are systematically used to create affordances for certain language choice practices.