Understanding Trilingual Education Reform in Kazakhstan: Why Is It Stalled?

Abstract

Trilingual education is an ambitious national plan in Kazakhstan which promotes the use of three languages: Kazakh as the state language, Russian as the language of interethnic communication, and English as the language of integration into the global economy. While three languages as individual subjects have always been taught in independent Kazakhstan, the trilingual education policy denoted a new approach envisioning the teaching of non-language curricular subjects through three different languages. Initiated in the 2000s, the idea of trilingualism has been continuously supported by the first President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, until his resignation in March 2019. Recently, the new President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has marked a new trend in the policy, announcing that bilingualism will become a priority. This chapter focuses on the analysis of the trilingual education policy process in Kazakhstan, using data from policy documents, mass media, findings of previous research, and the author’s experience of participating in policy development and implementation. Data are interpreted through the theoretical lenses of “four orientations framework,” “the critical analysis of actual policy texts,” “critical discourse analysis,” “Layers of planning and policy” (“onion”) framework. The analysis indicates that trilingual education implementation has become a highly controversial issue in Kazakhstan with different aspects being updated, resisted, or even abandoned. While strongly supporting the policy of trilingual education from top to bottom, the Government failed to communicate the policy concepts to a wide range of stakeholders and did not articulate clear and coherent policies for trilingual instruction.