Abstract
This report presents findings from a British Council-funded participatory action research project conducted in multilingual public schools in Nepal. It supports the implementation of Nepal’s language-in-education policy that allows the use of native languages as media of instruction in schools, alongside Nepali and English.
It involved twelve teachers (English, science, and mathematics) across seven public schools in Kathmandu and Lalitpur districts in Bagmati province of Nepal, who co-developed and trialled translanguaging strategies in their classrooms over one academic year. These schools were selected from urban/rural learning contexts, and considering the linguistic, gender and cultural characteristics of the students and teacher population speaking native languages such as Tamang, Newar (also known as Nepal Bhasha), Maithili, Bhojpuri and Nepali.
Our research traced teachers’ evolving practices in carrying out multilingual pedagogy, through their engagement in translanguaging activities. Data sources included workshop outputs, lesson plans, meeting transcripts, classroom observations, post-class reflections, and focus group discussions with teachers. The process involved researchers-teachers’ co-construction of learning resources, group work, face-to-face as well as virtual mentoring and peer support.
Findings demonstrate that when teachers are empowered as co-researchers and supported through mentorship and peer collaboration, they can gradually integrate multilingual pedagogy in a system dominated by languages such as English and Nepali. Teachers showed increased awareness of the role of native languages in children’s learning engagement, shifted their attitudes towards inclusive pedagogy, changed their conventionalised mono/bilingual thinking in relation to language use in the classroom, and developed creative classroom practices using multiple languages. However, constraints such as school’s English-medium instruction (EMI) or Nepali-medium instruction (NMI) policy, sociolinguistic hierarchies prevalent in Nepali society, and limited multilingual resources available for teachers in schools continue to pose challenges.
The study contributes to the theorisation of teacher professional development in low-resource, linguistically diverse contexts and provides practical recommendations for policy, teacher training, teacher education, and classroom implementation in developing a system to support teachers and policy actors in realising multilingualism in education.
It concludes by arguing for a holistic and sustained intervention approach that values local linguistic knowledge bases, and aligns professional learning with a broader systemic reform in education to contribute to achieving equitable and quality learning opportunities for all children.
See the project web pages for further information.
Citation
Choi, T.-H., Poudel, P. P., Rouabah, S., Gautam, G. R., & Wang, S. (2026). Empowering English language teachers to adopt multilingual pedagogy in Nepal through participatory action research. British Council. https://doi.org/10.57884/Q80G-NT62