How could multilingualism benefit India's poorest schoolchildren?

The crowded and bustling streets of Delhi teem with life. Stop to listen and, above the din of rickshaws and buses, you'll hear a multitude of languages, as more than 20 million people go about their daily lives. Many were born and raised here, and many millions more have recently made India's capital their home, having moved from surrounding neighbourhoods, cities and states or across the country, often in the hope of gaining better jobs and a better life. Some arrive speaking fluent Hindi, the dominant language in Delhi (and the official language of government), but many arrive speaking any number of India's 22 officially recognised languages, let alone the hundreds of regional languages in a country of more than 1.3 billion people.

A team of researchers led by Professor Ianthi Tsimpli of Cambridge University is currently working on a project collecting data on 1,000 primary-age children in Delhi and the cities of Hyderabad and Bihar. The overriding aim of the four-year project, called 'Multilingualism and Multiliteracy', is to find out why in a country where multilingualism is so common (more than 255 million people in India speak at least two languages, and nearly 90 million speak three or more languages), the many benefits of speaking more than one language, observed in schools in Europe for instance, do not apply to many of India's schoolchildren.

'Each year across India, 600,000 children are tested, and year after year over 50% of children in Standard 5 [ten-year-olds] cannot read a Standard 2 [seven-year-olds] task fluently, and just under 50% of them cannot solve a Standard 2 subtraction task,' says Tsimpli. She explains that low educational achievement can lead to many of these students dropping out of school – a problem disproportionately affecting female students.

Tsimpli and her colleagues are investigating whether these low learning outcomes could be caused by an Indian school system where the language that children are taught in often differs from the language used at home. The research project, which focuses on 8 to 11-year-old schoolchildren in rural and urban areas, collects data on whether the schoolchildren live in slum* or non-slum areas. Many of the children have moved from remote, rural areas to urban areas. They are so poor they have to live in slums and, as a result of migration, they may speak languages that are different from the regional language.

Having already tested 1,000 children, the researchers will now embark on retesting them. They intend to look not only at test results, but also at variables such as the standard of schooling, the environment and the teaching practices themselves. It's possible that one of the causes of low performance is the lack of pupil-centred teaching methods; in many Indian primary schools the teacher dominates and there is little room for independent learning.

Although the findings are at a preliminary stage, Tsimpli and her team have found that the medium of instruction used in schools, especially English, may hold back those children who have little familiarity with, or exposure to, the language before starting school and outside of school life. According to Tsimpli, most of the evidence from this and other projects shows that English instruction for children from low socio-economic areas might not be the best way for them to learn, at least in the first three years of primary education.

'What we would recommend for everyone, not just low socio-economic status children, would be to start learning in the language they feel comfortable learning in ... English can still be used, but perhaps not as the medium of instruction in primary schools. It could, for example, be one of the subjects that are being taught alongside other subjects. We are not suggesting that English be withdrawn – that ship has sailed – but we perhaps have to think more about learner needs. There is perhaps too much uniformity in teaching and less tailoring to the children's language abilities and needs,' says Tsimpli.

While the preliminary results show there is no difference in general intelligence among boys and girls from slum areas versus those from urban poor backgrounds, an unanticipated finding has been that children from slum backgrounds do not seem to lag behind children from other urban poor backgrounds – and in some cases outperform them (e.g. in numeracy and literacy tasks). According to the researchers, this unexpected finding may be down to the life experiences of children growing up in slums. They are likely to mature faster and come into closer contact with the numeracy skills essential for day-to-day survival.

The project has already caught the attention of government ministers, who are keen to use the findings of the study to inform and adjust school policy in Delhi and the wider state. 'They are as keen as us to understand how the challenging context of deprivation can be attenuated when focusing on the languages children learn and use while at school. Our findings don't mean you're doomed if you're poor. It may be that these low learning outcomes are because of the way education is provided in India, with a huge focus on Hindi and English as the mediums of instruction, to the potential detriment of children unfamiliar with those languages,' explains Tsimpli.

'Language is central to the way knowledge is transferred – so the medium of instruction is obviously hugely influential. We hope to ... show that problem solving, numeracy and literacy can and do improve in children who are educated in a language of instruction they know. The trick may be to bridge school skills with life skills and make use of the richness of a child's life experience to help them learn in the most effective ways possible,' says Tsimpli.

* slum: a very densely populated area in which the infrastructure is incomplete and services inadequate or non-existent