MULTILINGUAL ACADEMIC LITERACY AND ENGLISH-MEDIUM INSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES OF SINDH, PAKISTAN: AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY

Abstract

English has a powerful position in Pakistani higher education, but many undergraduates in Sindh enter university with uneven academic literacy, limited exposure to extended English writing, and strong multilingual resources that are rarely used systematically in English-medium classrooms. This paper investigates how university-level English applied linguistics can respond to the gap between English-medium policy and students' actual multilingual learning practices in Sindh, Pakistan. The paper is framed as a desk-based qualitative research study using documentary analysis and thematic synthesis of recent policy reports, national and provincial education evidence, and empirical studies on English-medium instruction, academic writing, translanguaging, and Pakistani English. The analysis shows that students' English difficulties are not simply individual weaknesses; they are produced by a long transition chain that begins in school, continues through college, and becomes visible at university through problems in academic vocabulary, grammar, morphology, coherence, argumentation, reading-to-write ability, and classroom participation. The paper proposes the Sindh Multilingual Academic Literacy Framework, which connects four dimensions: students' linguistic repertoires, academic English development, disciplinary literacy, and institutional support. This framework argues that English teaching at university level should combine explicit academic writing instruction, genre-based pedagogy, corpus-informed vocabulary learning, carefully planned translanguaging, feedback cycles, and teacher professional development. The paper contributes a new idea: English support in Sindh universities should be organized as a credit-bearing Academic Language Transition Studio rather than as a short remedial course. The study concludes that applied linguistics can offer a socially realistic, multilingual, and academically rigorous model for improving English learning at university level in Sindh in contemporary higher education settings.