A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF URDU AS A VEHICLE OF NATIONAL COHESION, ENGLISH AS LINGUISTIC CAPITAL AND THE STRUCTURAL ERASURE OF MOTHER TONGUES IN PAKISTAN'S SINGLE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

Abstract

The Single National Curriculum (SNC 2018-2020) is designed as initiative that unifies the educational system of Pakistan that is currently based on separate curricula for different types of schools and promotes the use of multiple languages in schools. This study critically analyzed the standardization other than equity. A qualitative research design was adopted. This study utilized the three dimension Critical Discourse Analysis framework, designed by Fairclough (1992, 2003) and an ideological square, designed by Van Dijk (2008) and a theory of linguistic capital proposed by Bourdieu (1991), on the five major SNC documents to show that the SNC refers to the three ideological operations at the same time. First it makes Urdu nationalism an implicit part of the curriculum content in textbooks to a formal part of the curriculum, by making patriotism and social cohesion as SLOs of Urdu language. Second, it enhances the symbolic and institutional status of English, transforming it from a school subject into a “communication skill”, investing in the institutionalization of assessment that is unique to English in the corpus. Third, it creates what this paper calls promissory pluralism: a new discursive category that means there is a gap between the policy communication and enactment of SLOs, and none at all for any of Pakistan's seventy-plus indigenous languages in 79 pages of the General Knowledge curriculum. The study contributes to audit the SNC's primary curriculum document on the SLO level and it brings in a theoretically concept of promissory pluralism, which is distinct from the earlier instances of NEPs' promissory deferral; and it shows that the SNC's universalization pushes further into Pakistan's language hierarchy after 1947.