The Centre for Multilingualism with English (CME) is pleased to invite you to its upcoming in-person talk titled ‘Reading comprehension within a translanguaging perspective, teacher education and multilingual-multimodal assessment: What do recent projects from India tell us?’ which will be led by Professor Lina Mukhopadhyay.

Date: Friday 4th April 2025
Time: 15:00-17:00

In-person location: King’s College London, Waterloo Campus, Franklin Wilkins Building (FWB) Room 1.17
Online: If you cannot make it to London do join us on Teams:
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Meeting ID: 369 513 061 141
Passcode: EW2Lv2LJ

Abstract
A majority of multilingual (ML) children across the globe, especially from low SES families, do not enjoy the home language to language of instruction overlap especially when the latter is English, and in contexts where it is not a language spoken at home or has limited use outside the classroom. This creates a huge learning disadvantage for such children globally (UNESCO GEM Report 2014, 2016). This trend was evident in a recently completed project in India (MultiLiLa 2016-2020) with 2500 plus fourth and fifth-grade multilingual children learning through English and other language(s) of instruction (Hindi and Telugu). The project funded by the British Academy was led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with a consortium of higher academic institutions in India and the UK and took place in the north (Delhi), east (Bihar) and south (Telangana) of India. The print comprehension skills in English of the children were much lower than in Hindi and Telugu though their oral comprehension and production skills were much higher across languages suggesting that multilingual orality is strong in children from low SES families, which can be used as a resource to leverage their learning of and in English (Tsimpli et al., 2020). The project also provided evidence of teachers using a mix of languages to teach English but their multilingual input was fragmented and not structured to scaffold learning English.
In an attempt to help teachers utilise the linguistic resources of children and scaffold their reading comprehension in English (and become multicompetent), a series of follow-up projects led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, from 2019 to 2023 were undertaken in Telangana. Thereafter, another project was taken up in Delhi and Assam funded by British Council India and led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with EFLU and a consortium of Indian and a German university from 2023 to 2026. In all these projects, the focus was on using translanguaging pedagogy to train teachers to use learners’ multilingual resources to scaffold their English reading comprehension and vocabulary-in-context skills in language and content classrooms. The projects were able to assess multilingual children through multilingual-multimodal assessments, which have provided evidence that growth in children’s comprehension can be tracked when they read in English and express understanding in a language they use at home. This presentation will report the results from the follow-up projects for supporting early reading and integrative skill acquisition in low-resource primary schools in India. The presentation will conclude by drawing implications for future work towards pre- and in-service teacher education in using multilingual pedagogy and creating a model for inclusive language education for multilingual societies in the Global South.

Professor Lina Mukhopadhyay is the Head of the Department of Training & Development at the English and Foreign Languages University, EFLU Hyderabad, India.

All welcome! And feel free to circulate within your networks.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics