Communicative English in the primary classroom: implications for English-in-education policy and practice in Bangladesh

Globalisation and the global spread of English have led nation-states to introduce English into the early years of schooling to equip their citizens with communicative competence in order to compete within a global economy for individual and national development. In teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language, nations have adopted learner-centred approaches such as communicative language teaching to conform to neoliberal discourses of global capitalism and liberal democracy on the one hand and policy directions and imperatives of world policy organisations and funding agencies on the other. In this paper, the implications of these global imperatives within the local context of Bangladeshi primary English classrooms are investigated and a comprehensive picture of the pedagogy in practice in terms of classroom discourses and interactions, learning activities and teacher and learner behaviours is drawn. This picture is supplemented by qualitative insights into primary L1 (first language) literacy pedagogy to demonstrate how materials and methods policies are acted out in the classroom context. It is argued that communicative English and learner-centred pedagogy cannot be seen, to a desirable extent, in actual classroom practice, thus impeding L2 teaching goals in the country.