Language is not merely a tool for communication or transmission of information. As a potent cultural artifact, it shares a dynamic relationship with cognition. Language not only enables a higher-level cognition, it also plays a role in shaping thought through its socio-cultural and historical rootedness.

Just as any ecosystem is strengthened by diversity, linguistic and cultural diversity also make our ecosystem richer and stronger. Multilingualism in society and among individuals is indisputable. However, we refuse to  acknowledge it or to address it in our classrooms. Due to this, rather than being considered a rich pedagogic resource, multilingualism begins to be seen as an obstruction. It becomes a language barrier imposed on students when their home languages are different from the medium of instruction in schools. Such children could often find it extremely difficult to comprehend the classroom transactions and participate in the process of meaning making. As a result, they remain distant from the concepts they may be forced to memorise in absence of comprehension.

Comprehension of concepts cannot happen if the child remains alienated from the classroom transactions. This concern is especially true for children coming from marginalised backgrounds who often find their language and everyday experiences excluded from the medium of instruction in school and the curriculum. Even children entering a primary school classroom come with rich life experiences and languages in which these experiences are given meaning and are shared. A classroom that fails to include children’s many languages and experiences reduces them to blank slates and makes them voiceless. This write up attempts to discuss the significance of including children’s languages in classrooms to facilitate participation as well as the understanding of concepts

If we think of education as a mere one-sided transmission of information by a more informed teacher to a set of uninformed students, then concerns about  classroom transactions failing to build a strong conceptual foundation may mean little to us. However, if we view educational processes as helping students develop into critically thinking and reflective beings, then the processes of classroom transaction become important. How many times have we entered school classrooms and heard children memorise and sing multiplication tables in chorus (four ones are four, four twos are eight, four threes are twelve) without really understanding that multiplication is repeated addition? How many times, while reciting the English alphabet, do we find children sing ‘elemenopee’ without realising that ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’, ‘O’ and ‘P’ are 5 different letters of the alphabet, representing five distinct sounds? How often do we find that the way children memorise laws of physics or formulae in mathematics are not very different from how they might memorise a poem or a song? The laws and formulae are rehearsed, mechanically applied to solve equations and then forgotten once the semester is over. It is not surprising then that as children move to higher classes where they are required to engage with more complex concepts, they begin to struggle. The struggle is particularly hard for children coming from impoverished and marginalised backgrounds, who have little help with academics at home.

Figures from National Sample Survey (NSS) 52nd round data (cited in Jayachandran, 2007) reveal that “children not interested in studies accounts for the highest proportion of dropouts in rural (37 per cent) and urban (37 per cent) areas and for both male and female children”. (p. 982). ‘Disinterest’ is likely when a child is unable to make meaning of classroom transactions. During my  the several visits I made to primary schools in rural areas in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Jharkhand during my research years, areas that had predominantly tribal population, one witnessed students who had fallen asleep in class, or blankly stared outside or at the floor, all because the meaning of the transactions was lost on them. The classes took place in Telugu, Odia and Hindi, while the  children in those classrooms had had little or no exposure to them. Imagine being taught mathematics in French when you have only begun to learn French sounds and the alphabet. Education involves more than just the transfer of knowledge from teacher or text to student. It also strives to develop cognitive development and get the child thinking about the more abstract concepts. . The latter, if attempted in language that children do not yet know, cannot be either meaningful or interesting for children.

The importance of connecting children’s experiences to educational processes has been emphasised by several scholars including John Dewey (1938) and Carl Rogers (1969) and many others. Different scholars have laid emphasis on different aspects of experience. For instance, Dewey talks about ‘educative’ and ‘mis-educative’ experiences. In other words, experiences that encourage learning and growth, and experiences that stall growth. Socio-cultural learning theorists like Bruner (1996) have emphasised trying to build on children’s existing experiences as new concepts are introduced. Concepts like ‘scaffolding’ (active support provided by more experienced adults) and ‘spiraling’ (continuous back and forth movement between older and newer concepts) postulated by Bruner have had a significant impact on our understanding about the role of children’s experience in learning. Both these processes involve children’s participation in spaces where dialogue is used to help build a strong conceptual understanding that weaves together everyday concepts that the child brings to the classroom with the more scientific concepts being introduced to her.

It is difficult to build  links between everyday and scientific concepts and move back-and-forth between old and new concepts if you do not the child’s language. While observing classrooms during my research, I came across several instances where teachers introduced new concepts like ‘living’ and ‘non-living’, by drawing on children’s existing experiences and encouraging them to actively think about these experiences to discover similarities and differences. During one of my field observations in Digantar school (Rajasthan), the teacher first asked all the children in the classroom to go outside, and come back with a list of the things they saw. When the children returned, they were asked to name all that they had seen. The blackboard was divided into three columns. In Column One, everything that the children had seen, such as, ‘truck’, ‘cow’, ‘stone’ and ‘plant’ were listed. They then had to divide the list into two teams. ‘Cow’ and ‘Stone’ were randomly picked as the captains of the two teams. The children were then asked to help the cow and stone form their teams.

It is important to note here that the children articulated their experiences and arguments in languages that were the languages of their experience and these included Marwari, Dhundhari and Hindi. The only rule was to pick up something listed in Column One and see whether it was similar to Cow or Stone and then assign it to the team it shared more similarities with. They were required to give reasons for their choice. For instance, if a child picked ‘truck’, and wanted to list it under the Team Cow, they would have to explain why they thought truck was similar to Cow and not to Stone. There were several occasions where children disagreed with one another and had to provide arguments for why they felt they were right. For example, on one occasion, a child felt that ‘bird’ was similar to Cow because they both moved, while another child felt that  ‘bird’ was similar to Stone since both were small. The teacher, on such occasions, asked questions to encourage more thinking. An excerpt from the conversation is presented below:

Student 1: Bird eats food, truck does not eat.

Student 2: Truck is big but bird is small.

Student 3: Bird flies but truck does not fly.

Student 4: But both truck and bird move from one place to another.

Teacher: This is true... But any difference in how they reach?

(There is a silence for several seconds.)

Student 2: Bird flies on its own, truck does not move on its own. Driver drives the truck.

As the conversation progressed with the help of careful questioning and prompts by the teacher, the children begin to talk more about properties like- eats, walks, dies, breathes, and the like. It was followed by further questions on ‘why eat’, ‘why breathe’, and so on. The teacher then introduced the terms ‘living’ and ‘non-living’, connecting these to their conversations and adding more explanations.

The hour-long conversation to explain this concept could easily be reduced to a ten-minute lecture where the gives the definitions of the two terms and then lists a few examples. However, by using children’s existing knowledge and experiences in their own languages to build new concepts, the teacher was able to involve them actively in the process of learning. Over the years, the teacher, whose mother tongue was Hindi, had realised the importance of familiarising herself with the different languages children brought to the classroom while introducing Hindi and English to them. No language was barred from the classroom as the students actively contributed to translating and explaining the words their friends said in the local languages. A multilingual classroom was a reflection of a larger multilingual context where the children interacted and gained exposure to different languages and hence learnt them from one another to strengthen the the bond they shared.

Now, imagine for a moment that the same class is to be taken in English (or only Hindi) with the same set of children coming. Would children be able to participate with equal enthusiasm and confidence? Would they be able to argue or reason with as much conviction? Would their focus remain on the content or would they be straining to remember the appropriate words and sentence structures in a language they are not yet comfortable in? How often, in our urgency to teach what we consider languages of importance, do we force children to compromise on conceptual understanding?

According to Mohanty, Panda and Tove-Kangass (2009),  in the early years of schooling, “they (children) can talk in their mother tongue in routine daily life and face-to-face situations. They express themselves in the present context using the mother tongue to talk about what they experience, see, hear and touch. They have necessary abilities for social communication or Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS)” (p. 1). However, as explained by Cummins (1981), this skill is initially only sufficient for non-academic, every day, informal communication. It takes children few more years of academic exposure and practice to develop more advanced language skills needed for academic engagement.

The language needed for scholastic engagement has been termed as Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Mohanty et al. (2009) point out that “beginning from their knowledge of the mother tongue, children develop higher levels of language skills in school. Development of knowledge and language always moves from simple to complex levels. However, education in a language other than the mother tongue hinders such progress and children cannot develop the ability for complex intellectual thinking with language”. Unfortunately, what we find in most schools is that before a child has even managed to develop advanced language skills in their mother tongue, the teaching shifts to a language which the child barely understands. To use Cummins’ terminology, our classroom pedagogy forces children to engage with complex academic concepts in a language in which they have barely been able to develop even basic interactional skills. This has led to the ‘culture of silence’ that prevails in most classrooms.

A mother-tongue-based multilingual pedagogy recognises the significance of both - mother tongue and other languages - in an individual’s life. However, it does not impose a hierarchical arrangement on languages where some are more privileged than others. In the example above, this is demonstrated when the burden of learning a new language or new vocabulary is not just on the children with a non-Hindi mother tongue, but also on the teacher who actively attempts to understand children’s language. It helps in the creation of more democratic classrooms where no experience is silenced in the absence of a language to voice it and by redefining the power structure between the teacher and the student. Even a child who spoke only Marwari and did not know Hindi felt included in the group activity. Not knowing Hindi did not become grounds for excluding voices or experiences. The teacher, through the willingness to familiarise oneself with new words and encouraging other students to also learn from one another, enables a more equal classroom where the burden of learning a new language is not only on the marginalised. Such a multilingual pedagogy facilitates both comprehension and a more sensitive entry into newer languages, experiences and concepts.  

References:

Bruner, J. (1996). Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cole, M. (1996).Cultural Psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cummins, J. (1981). Biliteracy, language proficiency, and educational programs. In J. R. Edwards, The Social Psychology of Reading (pp. 131-146). Silver Spring: Institute of Modern Languages.

Dewey, John. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan.

Dewey, John.(1938). Experience and Education. New York: N.Y. Touchstone.

Jayachandran, Usha. (2007). How high are dropout rates in India.Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 42 (11).

Mohanty, A. K.; Panda, M.; & Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2009). Why Mother Tongue Based MLE? New Delhi: National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium. pp.1-2.

Rogers, C. R. (1969). Freedom to learn: A view of what education might become.