Theorizing Multimodality From the Global South: English Pedagogy, Translanguaging, and Digital Inequality in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Despite growing emphasis on multimodal pedagogy, little research examines its enactment in Global South tertiary English education, where material constraints, linguistic diversity, and assessment cultures shape practice. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study investigates how Bangladeshi university teachers and students conceptualize, implement, and experience multimodal pedagogy, while critically interrogating dominant research grounded in Global North assumptions of technological stability, pedagogical autonomy, and monolingual norms. Data were generated through classroom observations, semi‐structured interviews with six teachers, and focus groups with 20 students, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal multimodality is adopted episodically rather than structurally, constrained by fragile infrastructures, rigid assessment regimes, and uneven digital access. Teachers engage in a pedagogical risk calculus, weighing innovation against risks associated with unstable technologies and syllabus pressures. The analysis demonstrates that translanguaging functions as a core semiotic resource, challenging monolingual orientations in mainstream scholarship. Although students valued multimodal instruction, participation was stratified along socioeconomic lines, exposing limitations of device‐dependent pedagogies in unequal contexts. The study advances a contextually grounded, decolonial account, arguing that multimodality is not a neutral enhancement but a negotiated, materially mediated, and ideologically situated practice with significant implications for linguistically and socio‐economically diverse educational settings.