Shaila Sultana
Biographic Data
| ID | 3686331 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shaila Sultana |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shaila |
| FAMILY NAME | Sultana |
| SIGNATURE | SULTANA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Dhaka |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3985-8488 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Decolonisation of World Englishes: A critical analysis of the English language textbook at the higher secondary level of education in Bangladesh
This paper provides a critical review of the English language textbook English for Today (EfT) (2022), taught in higher secondary education within Bangladesh, in relation to the decolonisation framework of World Englishes (WEs) and the concept of ‘colonialingualism’. The content analysis reveals that the ethos of WEs is minimally reflected across various linguistic features. While EfT incorporates ornamental expressions and employs Bangla words i…
Young professional Bangladeshi women with rebel bones: Trans-approaches to language and identity
The paper advances our understanding of the ‘translingual turn’ in applied linguistics and its role in exploring women’s entanglement with the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial selves. Based on a virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews of four young women from four different professions in Bangladesh, the paper shows that their performances of gender are tied up with the structured expectations of the linguistic and societal norms related t…
Transformation of Applied Linguistics in the Global South Context of Bangladesh: Researcher Agency, Imagination, and North-South Cooperation
This article examines the transformation of applied linguistics knowledge production in the Global South taking postcolonial Bangladesh as a case. In the 1990s, one could not locate even a dozen applied linguistics articles in international journals authored by Bangladeshi researchers. However, in about two decades, Bangladeshi researchers can claim hundreds of journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and edited volumes. Drawing on bibliometr…
Equity, fairness, and social justice in teaching and learning in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic
Equity is crucial in maintaining human rights in the education sector. It has become more crucial due to the abrupt global spread of coronavirus and the initiation and affordances of unequal accessibility to online teaching, specifically in resource deficit peripheral countries like Bangladesh. Hence, it seems pertinent to explore if online education ensures educational equity, fairness, and social justice for students and teachers in Bangladesh.…
Indigenous Ethnic Students in the Mainstream Education of Bangladesh: Cultural Misrecognition, Linguistic Inequality and Social Injustice
Epistemic Divides in Scholarly Publishing in Applied Linguistics: Multilingual Possibilities Versus Monolingual Realities in Postcolonial Bangladesh
The ongoing movement in applied linguistics towards decolonisation and dehegemonisation demands that we acknowledge multilingualism and comprehend how marginalised multilingual researchers are excluded from global knowledge creation. In light of this, this qualitative study investigates the realities and lived experiences of applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT) scholars in Bangladesh. Research participants include 14 applied li…
Translingual Practices: Playfulness and Precariousness
Applied linguistics from the Global South: Way forward to linguistic equality and social justice
The Commentary critically reflects on the papers published in the Special Issue (SI) of Applied Linguistics Review titled ‘Reflection and Reform of Applied Linguistics from the Global South: Power and Inequality in English users from the Global South’. While the papers in the SI add new insights to the recent innovations in the ontology and epistemology of Applied Linguistics based on research studies done in the contexts of Australia, Brazil, Ho…
The politics of distraction in English-medium higher education across three global settings: A collaborative autoethnography
English-medium instruction (EMI) is on the rise around the world due to globalization, internationalization and neoliberal ideologies which equate English with social capital, prestige, and success in the labour market. While many EMI policies aim to equip students with English as a ‘lingua academia’, produce ‘neoliberal subjects’ and compete in university ranking systems, such policies often overlook larger sociolinguistic, sociohistorical, and …
English as the medium of instruction and mother-tongue-based translanguaging: Challenges and prospects for tertiary education in Bangladesh and China
Colonial governmentality and Bangladeshis in the anthropocene: Loss of language, land, knowledge, and identity of the Chakma in the ecology of the Chittagong Hill tracts in Bangladesh
Can they do whatever they please. . . Turn settlements into barren land. Dense forests into deserts. Mornings into evenings. Turn fertile into barren. Why shall I not resist!. .... I become my whole self. . . Why shall I not resist”!. This is a section from a poem - ‘Joli No Udhim Kittei’ a Chakma poem written in Bengali script as ‘Rukhe Darabo Na Keno?’ (‘Why shall I not resist!’) by the author \Kabita Chakma in 1992, translated into English. It…
Mediated by the materiality of spaces
This commentary considers how the special issue ‘Mobilising Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies’ contributes to recent developments in theories that demonstrate the importance of taking a posthumanist approach to sociolinguistics research. While the papers in the special issue show how mobile communities, including migrants, asylum seekers, sex workers and domestic workers, make sense of and participate in different activities in the world, th…
Indigenous ethnic languages in Bangladesh: Paradoxes of the multilingual ecology
Languages are at the centre of nationalistic discourses across South Asia since they have played a historically and politically significant role in defining nationhood and both uniting and dividing countries throughout the British Empire. Despite multilingualism and multiculturalism, and vast differences in individual access to, and command of, mother tongue, national and official languages, paradoxically a collective language is always considere…
Language, Chronotope, Other Spaces and Times, and Identity
The purpose of this paper is to explore the intricate relationship between the spatial dynamics of real and imagined spaces, and to understand how language and identity evolve and emerge within these spaces. To do so, both face-to-face and digital conversations from an intensive three-month-long ethnographic research in Bangladesh, in which 29 participants took part, are analyzed with reference to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. The analysis…
Translingual practices and national identity mediated in the semiotized digital spaces
Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid trans - approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both discursively and non-discursively. Based on the notion of ‘practice’ by Theodore Schatzki (2002) , the paper focuses on t…
The ordinariness and extraordinariness of resistance: Young Bangladeshi professional women doing/undoing gender
English in a multilingual ecology: “Structures of feeling” in South and Central Asia
The paper foregrounds analysis of the significance of English in individual and collective life in relation to a myriad of feelings that religious and ethnic minorities experience in South and Central Asia within their multilingual ecology. The data reveal an entangling of varied yet coexisting emotions on the part of these minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Tajikistan in relation to English and its positioning vis-à-vis other languages. The…
Relocalization in digital language practices of university students in Asian peripheries: Critical awareness in a language classroom
Multiple Globalizations: Linguistic Landscapes in World-Cities
Language crossing of young adults in Bangladesh
Based on an intensive ethnographic study in a university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the paper explores ‘language crossing’ observable in casual and Facebook (FB) conversations of young adults in Bangladesh. The analysis of the data with ‘transglossic framework’ demonstrates that exaggerated pronunciation, slang and swear words in face-to-face conversations and orthographic patterns on FB make young adults’ language practices stylised and with the styl…
Ordinary English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia
This paper adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It thereby maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of…
Popular Culture in Transglossic Language Practices of Young Adults
Based on virtual conversations drawn from two separate intensive ethnographic studies in Bangladesh and Mongolia, we show that popular cultural texts play a significant role in young adults’ heteroglossic language practices. On the one hand, they borrow voices from cultural texts and cross the boundaries of language, i.e., codes, modes, and genres, and engage in translocalization and transculturation. On the other hand, they subtly manipulate var…
Unequal translingual Englishes in the Asian peripheries
This article seeks to expand the current discussions on the notion of ‘translingual Englishes’ by incorporating the idea of ‘unequal Englishes’ as a way of understanding the role of English in relation to understudied Asian peripheral contexts such as Mongolia and Bangladesh. It is clear that young speakers in these Asian countries are creatively involved with ‘translingual Englishes’, in which various English and other linguistic and cultural re…
Transglossic language practices: Young adults transgressing language and identity in Bangladesh
This paper contributes to a recent development in Applied Linguistics that encourages research from trans- approaches. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic research project carried out in a university of Bangladesh. It is illustrated how young adults actively and reflexively use a mixture of codes, modes, genres, and popular cultural texts in their language practices within the historical and spatial realities of their lives. The paper shows…
Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh
The translingual practices of young Mongolians and Bangladeshis suggest that contrary to those popular discourses which position youth as passive recipients of global culture, these young adults are better understood as actively and powerfully engaged with popular culture productions. Drawing on the examples of casual offline conversations and online Facebook interactions of university students in Mongolia and Bangladesh, this paper shows how pro…
Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia
Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia - two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery - this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful s…
Indigenous ethnic languages in Bangladesh: Paradoxes of the multilingual ecology
Languages are at the centre of nationalistic discourses across South Asia since they have played a historically and politically significant role in defining nationhood and both uniting and dividing countries throughout the British Empire. Despite multilingualism and multiculturalism, and vast differences in individual access to, and command of, mother tongue, national and official languages, paradoxically a collective language is always considere…
Transglossic language practices of young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia
The paper explores the use of varied semiotic resources in the linguistic, social and cultural practices of young adults in the context of Bangladesh and Mongolia. Based on a translinguistic analysis (including pre-textual history, contextual relations, sub-textual meaning, intertextual echoes and post-textual interpretation) of these practices, and linking this to other recent calls to reconceptualise the notions of bilingualism and multilingual…
Ordinary English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia
This paper adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It thereby maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of…
Colonial governmentality and Bangladeshis in the anthropocene: Loss of language, land, knowledge, and identity of the Chakma in the ecology of the Chittagong Hill tracts in Bangladesh
Can they do whatever they please. . . Turn settlements into barren land. Dense forests into deserts. Mornings into evenings. Turn fertile into barren. Why shall I not resist!. .... I become my whole self. . . Why shall I not resist”!. This is a section from a poem - ‘Joli No Udhim Kittei’ a Chakma poem written in Bengali script as ‘Rukhe Darabo Na Keno?’ (‘Why shall I not resist!’) by the author \Kabita Chakma in 1992, translated into English. It…
English as the medium of instruction and mother-tongue-based translanguaging: Challenges and prospects for tertiary education in Bangladesh and China
Language crossing of young adults in Bangladesh
Based on an intensive ethnographic study in a university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the paper explores ‘language crossing’ observable in casual and Facebook (FB) conversations of young adults in Bangladesh. The analysis of the data with ‘transglossic framework’ demonstrates that exaggerated pronunciation, slang and swear words in face-to-face conversations and orthographic patterns on FB make young adults’ language practices stylised and with the styl…
The politics of distraction in English-medium higher education across three global settings: A collaborative autoethnography
English-medium instruction (EMI) is on the rise around the world due to globalization, internationalization and neoliberal ideologies which equate English with social capital, prestige, and success in the labour market. While many EMI policies aim to equip students with English as a ‘lingua academia’, produce ‘neoliberal subjects’ and compete in university ranking systems, such policies often overlook larger sociolinguistic, sociohistorical, and …
English in a multilingual ecology: “Structures of feeling” in South and Central Asia
The paper foregrounds analysis of the significance of English in individual and collective life in relation to a myriad of feelings that religious and ethnic minorities experience in South and Central Asia within their multilingual ecology. The data reveal an entangling of varied yet coexisting emotions on the part of these minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Tajikistan in relation to English and its positioning vis-à-vis other languages. The…
Young professional Bangladeshi women with rebel bones: Trans-approaches to language and identity
The paper advances our understanding of the ‘translingual turn’ in applied linguistics and its role in exploring women’s entanglement with the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial selves. Based on a virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews of four young women from four different professions in Bangladesh, the paper shows that their performances of gender are tied up with the structured expectations of the linguistic and societal norms related t…
Epistemic Divides in Scholarly Publishing in Applied Linguistics: Multilingual Possibilities Versus Monolingual Realities in Postcolonial Bangladesh
The ongoing movement in applied linguistics towards decolonisation and dehegemonisation demands that we acknowledge multilingualism and comprehend how marginalised multilingual researchers are excluded from global knowledge creation. In light of this, this qualitative study investigates the realities and lived experiences of applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT) scholars in Bangladesh. Research participants include 14 applied li…
The ordinariness and extraordinariness of resistance: Young Bangladeshi professional women doing/undoing gender
Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia
Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia - two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery - this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful s…
Young adults' linguistic manipulation of English in Bangla in Bangladesh
It is commonly assumed in the print media that bilingual young adults in Bangladesh are subjugated by the colonial legacy of English and they are ‘polluting’ Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, by their indiscriminate insertion of English in it. However, this ethnographic study on a group of young adults in a university in Bangladesh shows that this assumption is simplistic and inadequate. A close linguistic analysis of extracts from the…
Transglossic language practices of young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia
The paper explores the use of varied semiotic resources in the linguistic, social and cultural practices of young adults in the context of Bangladesh and Mongolia. Based on a translinguistic analysis (including pre-textual history, contextual relations, sub-textual meaning, intertextual echoes and post-textual interpretation) of these practices, and linking this to other recent calls to reconceptualise the notions of bilingualism and multilingual…
Transglossic language practices: Young adults transgressing language and identity in Bangladesh
This paper contributes to a recent development in Applied Linguistics that encourages research from trans- approaches. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic research project carried out in a university of Bangladesh. It is illustrated how young adults actively and reflexively use a mixture of codes, modes, genres, and popular cultural texts in their language practices within the historical and spatial realities of their lives. The paper shows…
Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh
The translingual practices of young Mongolians and Bangladeshis suggest that contrary to those popular discourses which position youth as passive recipients of global culture, these young adults are better understood as actively and powerfully engaged with popular culture productions. Drawing on the examples of casual offline conversations and online Facebook interactions of university students in Mongolia and Bangladesh, this paper shows how pro…
Unequal translingual Englishes in the Asian peripheries
This article seeks to expand the current discussions on the notion of ‘translingual Englishes’ by incorporating the idea of ‘unequal Englishes’ as a way of understanding the role of English in relation to understudied Asian peripheral contexts such as Mongolia and Bangladesh. It is clear that young speakers in these Asian countries are creatively involved with ‘translingual Englishes’, in which various English and other linguistic and cultural re…
Popular Culture in Transglossic Language Practices of Young Adults
Based on virtual conversations drawn from two separate intensive ethnographic studies in Bangladesh and Mongolia, we show that popular cultural texts play a significant role in young adults’ heteroglossic language practices. On the one hand, they borrow voices from cultural texts and cross the boundaries of language, i.e., codes, modes, and genres, and engage in translocalization and transculturation. On the other hand, they subtly manipulate var…
Language crossing of young adults in Bangladesh
Based on an intensive ethnographic study in a university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the paper explores ‘language crossing’ observable in casual and Facebook (FB) conversations of young adults in Bangladesh. The analysis of the data with ‘transglossic framework’ demonstrates that exaggerated pronunciation, slang and swear words in face-to-face conversations and orthographic patterns on FB make young adults’ language practices stylised and with the styl…
Ordinary English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia
This paper adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English amongst Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It thereby maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of…
Multiple Globalizations: Linguistic Landscapes in World-Cities
Relocalization in digital language practices of university students in Asian peripheries: Critical awareness in a language classroom
Language, Chronotope, Other Spaces and Times, and Identity
The purpose of this paper is to explore the intricate relationship between the spatial dynamics of real and imagined spaces, and to understand how language and identity evolve and emerge within these spaces. To do so, both face-to-face and digital conversations from an intensive three-month-long ethnographic research in Bangladesh, in which 29 participants took part, are analyzed with reference to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. The analysis…
Translingual practices and national identity mediated in the semiotized digital spaces
Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid trans - approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both discursively and non-discursively. Based on the notion of ‘practice’ by Theodore Schatzki (2002) , the paper focuses on t…
The ordinariness and extraordinariness of resistance: Young Bangladeshi professional women doing/undoing gender
English in a multilingual ecology: “Structures of feeling” in South and Central Asia
The paper foregrounds analysis of the significance of English in individual and collective life in relation to a myriad of feelings that religious and ethnic minorities experience in South and Central Asia within their multilingual ecology. The data reveal an entangling of varied yet coexisting emotions on the part of these minorities in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Tajikistan in relation to English and its positioning vis-à-vis other languages. The…
Mediated by the materiality of spaces
This commentary considers how the special issue ‘Mobilising Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies’ contributes to recent developments in theories that demonstrate the importance of taking a posthumanist approach to sociolinguistics research. While the papers in the special issue show how mobile communities, including migrants, asylum seekers, sex workers and domestic workers, make sense of and participate in different activities in the world, th…
Indigenous ethnic languages in Bangladesh: Paradoxes of the multilingual ecology
Languages are at the centre of nationalistic discourses across South Asia since they have played a historically and politically significant role in defining nationhood and both uniting and dividing countries throughout the British Empire. Despite multilingualism and multiculturalism, and vast differences in individual access to, and command of, mother tongue, national and official languages, paradoxically a collective language is always considere…
Translingual Practices: Playfulness and Precariousness
Applied linguistics from the Global South: Way forward to linguistic equality and social justice
The Commentary critically reflects on the papers published in the Special Issue (SI) of Applied Linguistics Review titled ‘Reflection and Reform of Applied Linguistics from the Global South: Power and Inequality in English users from the Global South’. While the papers in the SI add new insights to the recent innovations in the ontology and epistemology of Applied Linguistics based on research studies done in the contexts of Australia, Brazil, Ho…
The politics of distraction in English-medium higher education across three global settings: A collaborative autoethnography
English-medium instruction (EMI) is on the rise around the world due to globalization, internationalization and neoliberal ideologies which equate English with social capital, prestige, and success in the labour market. While many EMI policies aim to equip students with English as a ‘lingua academia’, produce ‘neoliberal subjects’ and compete in university ranking systems, such policies often overlook larger sociolinguistic, sociohistorical, and …
English as the medium of instruction and mother-tongue-based translanguaging: Challenges and prospects for tertiary education in Bangladesh and China
Colonial governmentality and Bangladeshis in the anthropocene: Loss of language, land, knowledge, and identity of the Chakma in the ecology of the Chittagong Hill tracts in Bangladesh
Can they do whatever they please. . . Turn settlements into barren land. Dense forests into deserts. Mornings into evenings. Turn fertile into barren. Why shall I not resist!. .... I become my whole self. . . Why shall I not resist”!. This is a section from a poem - ‘Joli No Udhim Kittei’ a Chakma poem written in Bengali script as ‘Rukhe Darabo Na Keno?’ (‘Why shall I not resist!’) by the author \Kabita Chakma in 1992, translated into English. It…
Transformation of Applied Linguistics in the Global South Context of Bangladesh: Researcher Agency, Imagination, and North-South Cooperation
This article examines the transformation of applied linguistics knowledge production in the Global South taking postcolonial Bangladesh as a case. In the 1990s, one could not locate even a dozen applied linguistics articles in international journals authored by Bangladeshi researchers. However, in about two decades, Bangladeshi researchers can claim hundreds of journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and edited volumes. Drawing on bibliometr…
Equity, fairness, and social justice in teaching and learning in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic
Equity is crucial in maintaining human rights in the education sector. It has become more crucial due to the abrupt global spread of coronavirus and the initiation and affordances of unequal accessibility to online teaching, specifically in resource deficit peripheral countries like Bangladesh. Hence, it seems pertinent to explore if online education ensures educational equity, fairness, and social justice for students and teachers in Bangladesh.…
Indigenous Ethnic Students in the Mainstream Education of Bangladesh: Cultural Misrecognition, Linguistic Inequality and Social Injustice
Sociology (26 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (25 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)