India is a richly multilingual country, home to thousands of mother tongues, only a few of which find mention in official policy documents, or are taught at school. Practitioners and academics working in the domain of early language and literacy run up first, last, and always into issues related to multilingualism.

For many, these pose a deep and perplexing dilemma. The title of Dhir Jhingran’s chapter captures the situation: “Hundreds of home languages and many in most classrooms”…What are educators and those interested in early language and literacy to make of this? This is a “burning issue” for both practice and academics, and hence, is taken up as the first theme for ELI’s blog and resources sections – describing the contextual realities of linguistically diverse Indian classrooms. Saktibrata Sen describes this complex scenario in his blog piece, where several “overlapping” languages confuse him about which language exactly the individual is speaking!

Many related issues get rolled into the topic of “multilingualism”, such that there is a lack of clarity on what the term means. At their core, each of these issues and their proponents are trying to articulate their sense of how best to teach and learn in multilingual contexts and classrooms, hence the term “multilingualism”. Here we briefly describe several issues/concerns that seem to characterize the conversations around multilingual education in India.

Multilingual Education. Do we consider multilingualism as simply the context in which we all work (and therefore have to deal with the challenges it poses to education), or do we see multilingualism as a goal and resource for our society? Do we wish to remain a multilingual society? Do we care about maintaining our linguistic diversity, about preserving our varied language and knowledge systems, or do we simply “problem-solve” multilingualism in the classroom? If we wish to simply problem-solving multilingualism, then all we have to do is to “find ways to support learners in the classroom” (which, itself, is a complex issue!). But, if we wish to consciously remain a multilingual society, then we would have to invest a significant amount of time, energy and resources to policy making, teacher education, curriculum development, and so on. This is an issue of normative vision, one which Ajit Mohanty and his colleagues highlight powerfully in their book, Multilingual Education for Social Justice.

Mother Tongues in the Classroom. All the position papers in our country, the experts, the committees, are united in saying that mother tongue should serve as the medium of instruction in elementary school classrooms. There are strong pedagogical, psychological and societal reasons for this recommendation. Giridhar Rao’s blog piece advocates the use of mother tongues in the classroom, citing from research evidence that shows compelling reasons for doing so.

Yet, we know that the reality is that a large number of children are learning in classrooms that use an “other tongue” and not the “mother tongue”. What are practitioners to do in this situation? Firstly, most classrooms favor the use of regional language (e.g., Hindi) over the mother tongues of children (e.g., Marwari). So, in this case, at best, mother tongues can be used as informal supplements in the classrooms. Secondly, even if policy makers gave teachers the permission, the curricular materials and the time to use mother tongues in early language classrooms, would they be used merely to help students to “transition” or “bridge” to the standard (regional) language, or, would they be used with an intent to fostering the mother tongues for their own sake? Also, how can a teacher who doesn’t know the mother tongues of all the students in the classroom, teach through the mother tongues? Is it realistic to expect governments to produce curricular materials and provide teacher education for all the different mother tongues in a given state? These are stubborn questions related to societal vision, commitment, policy-making and practice, which don’t have easy answers.

Nivedita Bedadur describes the pedagogical struggles of children learning in classrooms that exclude their mother tongue, and provides a starter list of ideas that teachers could use to help children “bridge” from home to school languages.

Second Language Learning. Given the complexities described here, many Indian children are not being provided with instruction in their mother tongues. Hence, they are second language learners in the classroom. What are common challenges faced by second language learners in the classroom, and how can teachers, administrators and policy makers help such students to succeed? While we do not have a blog piece dedicated to answering this question, some of the resources linked to this blog may have answers for the interested practitioner.

English Medium Instruction. An increasing number of parents in contemporary India want English-medium instruction for their children. Even if they cannot afford it, they are willing to withdraw their children from government schools and enroll them into private schools in order to access English. Under this pressure, many government schools across the country are now offering English from the primary grades as a second language; and many are also switching to English as medium of instruction. What are we to make of this, and how are we to navigate it in a context where teachers, themselves, are ill prepared to teach English, children lack access to spoken English in their environments, and so on? While the cognitive, socio-emotional and pedagogical arguments against English as medium of instruction have been articulated over and over again by scholars, educators and policy-makers alike, the political/economic aspiration for English is real and deserves our collective attention. The Dalit argument, in particular, is a powerful one – can we justify and live with an “English for the classes, mother tongue for the masses” position? At the same time, can we ignore the equally real pedagogical, developmental and cultural arguments against English?

Shuchi Sinha briefly describes the argument for English in her blog piece; while Parthasarathy Misra provides a few practical strategies for using multilingualism as a resource in the English language classroom.

These, and several other questions run deep through conversations related to multilingualism. We urge you to participate actively by engaging with the blog posts and by helping to deepen our collective understanding related to these issues. Please feel free to send in blog pieces of your own, or to suggest resources that we may have overlooked. Our team will moderate the comments and posts, as we also facilitate and help shape the discussions. Our goal is not to emerge with one common understanding of these issues, but to develop a shared and evolving understanding of the issues, concerns and positions.