Abstract:
Language is a potent tool of representation and it encapsulates the thoughts,
ideas and feelings of a community which uses it as an instrument of handling
the world. As a collective memory bank, it cartographs the history, culture,
attitudes and thought-process and enables its speaker-community to form
concepts and achieve cognitive and conceptual development. English has
occupied a very crucial place in Bangladesh side by side with its national
language and mother tongue viz. Bengali. Different streams of the education
system, such as general education, madrasah education, English medium
education and English version education in primary. secondary and tertiary
levels are using English as a medium of instruction in different degrees in their
pedagogy, and thus, English is treated in varied ways in different streams
of education system here. In some streams it is treated as a substitution
language and in some other streams it is used as merely a supplementary
language of Bengali. However, using mixed methods, this paper will seek to
pursue the research question regarding how the diverse roles of English as a
medium of instructions impact the cognitive and conceptual development of
the learners.
