The Literary Society of the Department of English at Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) will host an online webinar on emerging concepts in multilingual communication on 30 October 2026, from 3 pm to 4:30 pm, according to the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP). The webinar is titled Beyond the Code-Switching / Translanguaging Divide: A Multi-Level Framework for Multilingual Communication. It is being organised in collaboration with PakTESOL, and the keynote speaker will be Dr Arshad Ali Khan, a professor at the University of Management and Technology (UMT) in Lahore. AIOU has shared a Microsoft Teams link for participation and has invited students, researchers, and language enthusiasts to join the session.
The session will look at the debate between code-switching and translanguaging, two ways of describing how people use more than one language when they speak or write. Code-switching usually refers to moving between languages within a conversation or a sentence, and it treats the languages as separate systems that a speaker alternates between. Translanguaging is a newer idea in language education that treats the speaker’s languages as parts of one linguistic repertoire, which learners and teachers can draw on together to make meaning. According to AIOU, the webinar will propose a multi-level framework for understanding multilingual communication in both academic and everyday settings, which suggests that the speaker will try to connect the two views and not choose between them.
The topic is relevant in Pakistan, where many students and teachers use Urdu, English, and a regional language such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, or Saraiki in the same day, and often in the same sentence. Classrooms, workplaces, and social media in the country regularly mix languages, and researchers in English language teaching have debated how teachers should treat that mixing. The webinar’s themes of language, culture, and communication are reflected in its promotional material, which uses greetings from several languages, including Hello, Bonjour, Hola, Salam, and Hallo, to show the global nature of multilingual speech. APP’s report does not say which findings or examples Dr Khan will present, so the details of the proposed framework will only become clear during the session.
The webinar is part of the AIOU Literary Society’s regular academic activities, which APP says are aimed at encouraging critical discussion of language and building research skills among students. PakTESOL, the partner organisation, is an association of teachers of English in Pakistan, and its involvement makes it likely that the discussion will focus on teaching practice and research as well as theory. AIOU is the country’s open university and serves a large number of distance-learning students, so an online format allows participants from different cities to take part without travelling. The report does not say whether the session will be recorded, whether certificates will be offered, or whether registration is required beyond using the Teams link.
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