Multilingual Education and India

The Language Learning Foundation has been generous enough to share their  webinar series which discusses the complexities of Multilingual Education in the Indian linguistic context in light of the National Education Policy 2020 and NIPUN Bharat guidelines. These webinars were organised during the month of August - September, 2022 and are readily available resources accessible on YouTube. The webinar links have been provided in the titles below and in the Resources section.  Three webinars were organised. The first two were conducted in Hindi, and the third one in English. The links and details of each webinar are given below. The speakers’ contributions were very valuable as the speakers were experts in their fields belonging to institutions such as Harvard, NCERT, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, UNICEF, LLF, experienced teachers,  and MLE specialists.  Webinar 1: Inclusion of the Children’s Home Languages in Foundational Learning This Webinar discussed the importance of incl...

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for foundational stage education was released by the Union minister for education last month. The good news for Multilingual Education is that the NCF highly recommends the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in the primary and the pre-primary grades for both public and private schools: “The home language serves as a facilitator for all learning and enables children to form connections with prior learning and home learning.” (P 74). The NCFs are detailed guidelines based on which school syllabi undergo revisions. The first NCF, in 1975, called the mother tongue the child’s “most natural medium of communication.”  The NCF 2000 promoted the use of the mother tongue not just in primary school but beyond, throughout one’s education. NCF 2005 said that Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) would “normally be in the child’s ‘first’ language, or home language” should be used for education. Now finally we have reached the point ...

Good to note that there is an International Day of Sign Languages! Sign languages are vital for the large deaf communities in the country and need recognition. Even last week I was in a meeting where I again heard about tens of thousands of deaf children who grow up without language as nobody teaches them how to sign. Recognition of this problem is very much needed and so is literacy for the deaf. On World Sign Language day on the 23th of September, Hindustan Times reported that disability rights activists and members of the Deaf Association in Pune spoke about the fact that students who are hearing impaired often have limited study options. This meeting focused particularly on the opportunities for higher studies as many universities do not offer courses in sign language.  However, as shown in his beautiful Oscar-winning short film, The Silent Child : many deaf children around the globe, even at the primary level, are excluded from education. Definition There are many misconcept...

The Language  and Learning Foundation has conducted India's first-ever language mapping of schools survey in Chhattisgarh: Language Mapping of Schools in Chhattisgarh .  The survey was carried out under the NIPUN Bharat initiative  in collaboration with the Government of Chhattisgarh and UNICEF India. The report  maps the different language situations that are present in each school with the aim to design an effective education strategy and policy. Through this research almost 30,000 schools were surveyed. The focus was on the first grade and the information gathered was mainly through the teachers. The following conclusion was stated in the summary of the report: The survey shows that in about 75% of the schools students are likely to face moderate to severe learning disadvantage due to the difference between their home language and the school language used as the medium of instruction. It also shows that about 95% of students at the time of entry to the primary sc...

During this 10-day, face-to-face course ,  participants will be introduced to foundational concepts in MLE.  They will then survey a number of practical techniques for developing language-sensitive learning materials.  Finally, there will be a brief exposure to teaching methods which leverage the learner's home language in the classroom. You can find the announcement also on this tweet , and this LinkedIn announcement .  2022 November 7-18, 2022, Guwahati, Assam Links : Register for updates &  Application By the end of this course the participants will be able to: Explain key principles relating to the aims, goals and implementation of strong MTB-MLE programs. Explain key theories relating to teaching and learning in MLE programs Connect theoretical concepts with relevant national/state curriculum competencies Describe how teaching materials support literacy development in L1 and L2 Understand the process of creating early teaching materials in the L1 Descr...

The National Education Policy (NEP) completed two years last month. This is a good reason to ask what the NEP 2020 has meant for multilingual education in India. There has been significant talk about introducing or strengthening  Multilingual Education in various state-level primary schools, but has there been action? The NEP 2020  has brought multilingual education higher on the agenda in India.  As an indicator, I did a quick research in Google and compared the Google hits in the  two years after NEP(2020-22) and two years prior(2018-20). I got 6500 hits since June 2020 when I searched for "Multilingual education" in India, while the two years before that had less than half of that.  The extra attention has caused a wider group of people to be thinking of the issues related to multilingual education. The home minister, for example, recently stated that, when we do not use Indian languages to teach, we are not able to utilise the full potential of the country. ...