CHALLENGES POSED BY “OTHER TONGUE” AS THE MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
	Yusra Mustafa 	

ABSTRACT
Many higher education teachers in Pakistan face a dilemma; that students struggle to participate in classroom discussions, compose assignments and comprehend exanimation questions, merely due to the fact that the medium of instruction (MOI) is English. Even though English is largely understood in the society, its academic use is another matter. Pedagogical research indicates that if the MOI is not the mother tongue, learners need extensive literacy training to develop the skills required to use it academically. Hence, this cross-sectional case study was designed to discover what challenges English poses as the MOI, being the students’ second/third/fourth language, also known as other tongue as opposed to mother tongue. A class of M.A. previous students of the Department of English from the University of Karachi was chosen to investigate the effects of having other tongue as MOI. First, a brief form was administered to the students to learn about their linguistic and educational backgrounds. Next, they were asked to write a paragraph of 80-150 words on an academic topic so as to enable an estimate of their language proficiency. Finally, ten participants were selected for interviews on the basis of their 1) form responses, 2) linguistic proficiency as reflected by the use of mechanics, cohesiveness, coherence, content and relevance of their paragraphs and 3) past grades in the program. Each interview was of 15 minutes’ duration, was semi-structured and administered individually. Data collection during the interviews was done using field notes and audio-recordings. Overall, a strong correlation was found between proficiency in the MOI and academic success. Interviewees expressed that language barriers in their oral English skills had negligible effects on their academic performance, while weaknesses in reading had considerable effects due to lexical and syntactic complexities in reading material. Writing was considered the most difficult of all, because students felt that they were unable to write grammatically, speedily and cohesively in English. This research sheds light on the poor quality of English literacy training in our educational context and calls for improvement so that students from various backgrounds can have equal opportunities to develop their knowledge and careers.
KEY WORDS: medium of instruction, mother tongue, other tongue, academic proficiency, language barrier