36.1149, Confs: CME event: ‘Reading comprehension within a translanguaging perspective' Prof Lina Mukhopadhyay (United Kingdom)

Thu Apr 3 23:05:08 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1149. Thu Apr 03 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1149, Confs: CME event: ‘Reading comprehension within a translanguaging perspective' Prof Lina Mukhopadhyay (United Kingdom)

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Date: 02-Apr-2025
From: Alessia Cogo [alessia.cogo at kcl.ac.uk]
Subject: CME event: ‘Reading comprehension within a translanguaging perspective' Prof Lina Mukhopadhyay

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:
Join conversation
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

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