This article is written for the Multilingual Education Blog, coordinated through the Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group.

India is a diverse and linguistically rich country, home to over 19,500 spoken languages, of which 121 are spoken by 10,000 or more people. Multilingualism is thus at the heart of the Indian existence and experience.

India’s classrooms are no exception. The country’s teachers—arguably the key enablers of any successful education system—must be equipped with pedagogical skills that will enable them to leverage the diverse linguistic and cultural identities, meaning-making processes and lived experiences characterising any multilingual classroom. At the same time, indigenous multilingual teachers already have their own linguistic experiences and everyday realities that can inform their pedagogical practices. Such practices are likely to be the most successful in this teaching context; therefore, if teaching and learning are to flourish, the inherent pedagogical practices of indigenous teachers should come to inform teacher professional development and training.

As a background, education policies in India have emphasised the importance of both teaching in and learning regional languages through different iterations of the ‘three-language formula’ policy. In previous iterations, this policy proposed that two Indian languages and English were to be utilized in school education. However, a study in 2011 calculated that only 31 languages were being used as mediums of instruction across the country, a figure representing a notable reduction from over 67 languages used by Indian educators in the 1970s.

(Source: British Council)

Lack of adequate teacher professional development and a general dearth of high-quality bilingual teaching and learning materials may have doubly hampered India’s implementation of the ‘three language formula’. More recently, the latest National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) outlines an updated formula which allows states and regions to choose languages of instruction as long as at least two are Indian in origin. In its acknowledgement of the need for good quality bilingual materials and the need for teachers to be adequately skilled, the NEP takes an important step towards closing the implementation gap and highlighting the importance of indigenous languages.

Learners need strong foundational skills to be able to succeed, and in this regard, there is widespread evidence about the effectiveness of mother tongue instruction (MTI) in learners’ early years. However, in multilingual contexts, questions such as ‘whose mother tongue’ can be a challenging one for a teacher. Furthermore, teaching an additional language such as English could pose a challenge. In the ‘English language teaching, learning and assessment in India’ report, one teacher identified the challenge of having to support learners who speak a particular language at home that differs from the official language of instruction at school. Such learners find it difficult to transition to English. Situations like these require teachers to have expert training and support if they are to make effective use of classroom methodologies. Consequently, there is a need for a clear professional development pathway to enable teachers to incorporate multilingual teaching approaches in their pedagogies.

(Source: British Council)

While there is a recognised need for teacher professional development, teachers in India have been responding to these challenges with their own intuitive understanding of what works. Recent studies have found that multilingual practices are adopted almost without exception – ‘knowingly or unknowingly’. Findings in the Multilingualism and Multiliteracy (MultiLiLa) project have demonstrated this. The project aimed to identify whether children who learn through a language differing from their home languages demonstrate different levels of learning outcomes than those children whose home and school languages are the same.

While the MultiLiLa project found that using children’s own languages in the classroom improves their learning, and that teachers need training in using multilingual approaches to teach concepts and to support children in learning new languages, language mixing, also referred to as translanguaging, was a common practice both in English medium and regional-language medium schools. For example, findings have indicated that even in Hindi-medium schools in Delhi, 62.5 per cent of teachers mixed languages; in EMI schools, 77.1 per cent did so. A recent survey by Macmillan Education India highlighted how teachers of English as a subject demonstrated significant awareness of using multilingual approaches in the classroom and stressed the need for focussed training of teachers to enable them to ‘integrate multilingual methods when preparing, organising, and structuring lessons.’

Identifying and examining these 'bottom up' multilingual practices and understanding the existing evidence base are essential to building good practice into policy implementation. Such an approach will ‘legitimise’ teachers’ own intuitive approaches and help build upon what’s already working. A Community of Practice (CoP) approach that has ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ could be a model for teachers to give voice to these practices through sharing, examining and learning together.

(Source: British Council)

A teachers’ CoP will enable indigenous practices to emerge such as those illustrated above, as well as provide a platform for practitioners and researchers to reflect upon and examine them. A review of six international projects—including those in India where CoPs were implemented in the form of Teacher Activity Groups (TAGs)—found that teachers responded positively to such meetings, in part because these were not imposed ‘top down’, and activities were situated in what teachers already do in their classrooms. Teachers also reported enhanced student learning experiences. CoPs would therefore seem to harbour a potential for teachers dealing with multilingual classrooms in India. Further research is needed that will focus on capturing and recording these practices, and be informed by them, thus taking a similar ‘bottom up’ approach of investigation.

In conclusion, along with more consistently emphasizing the incorporation of local languages in teaching and learning processes, education policies could also consider outlining a clear roadmap for supporting indigenous teachers in their exploring the opportunities and navigating the complexities of multilingual classrooms more effectively. Foremost implied in this support system should be the development of a CoP ecosystem which is teacher led, continuous, and sustainable, alongside other training and development initiatives.

This article is written by Radhika Gholkar, Head – Academic English Programmes, British Council India.

British Council is a member of the Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group and a member of the Steering Committee for the 7th International Conference on Language and Education, 4-6 October, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand.