Translingual Resourcefulness for Sustainable Place-Based English Language Education in Multilingual Assam

Padmini Bhuyan Boruah, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India

Introduction

Purnima (named changed), a primary school teacher, teaches in Grade 3 in an English-as-a-medium-of-instruction (EMI) government school in a rural district of Assam, a highly multilingual state in the North East of India. Purnima’s learners comprise speakers of at least four different home languages - Assamese, Hindi, Bodo and a variety of Bengali. Some speak in Assamese, the dominant state language, while some others have to communicate in Hindi since they are more fluent in Hindi than in Assamese, and their classmates and teachers do not speak Bodo, their home language. A third group of learners sit quietly, unwilling to engage – either with peers or the teacher, as their home language, an unnamed variety of Bengali, is often made fun of by classmates and others. Purnima does not know all her learners’ languages, so she resorts to Assamese and Hindi to teach the English lesson, even though the school mandates that English should be the medium of instruction. Purnima uses English only to read aloud and conduct choral reading, as her students hardly understand grade level English, and she is tasked with finishing the syllabus on time as well as ensuring her learners pass the exams so that they can be promoted to the next class. Purnima represents a large number of English teachers working in government as well as private schools where the regional language or English is the medium of instruction. Depending on the geographical location, their classrooms include learners from a number of language communities, with varying degrees of proficiency in the dominant language Assamese.

Policy and Practice: The Language Education Context

Using home languages for equitable, just and inclusive education is a mandate of the National Education Policy (NEP) (2020). It is grounded on the suggestions in previous national education policies and the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) (2005), which had declared that

Failing to use their (and their teachers’) existing cognitive and linguistic abilities deprives us of a resource, and alienates the learner, who fails to make a connection between the new language and her mental world. This is the consideration behind our recommendation for cutting across the barriers between languages, and between content subjects and languages (p. 9).

The “cutting across barriers between languages” in education is now considered the bedrock of language education planning in India, and one way of fulfilling India’s commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4. Recognition of children’s languages and cultural heritage promotes “learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art in the learners’ place: immediate schoolyard, neighbourhood, town, or community” (Singleton, 2024, p. 2).

The challenge, in the Indian context, is to honour learners’ linguistic and cultural heritage while at the same time providing good quality education for/in English. Unlike the previous education policies, the NEP 2020 does not have a section devoted to the teaching of English, although it places a strong emphasis on exploiting learners’ multilingual resources. The absence of specific policy guidelines for the use of learners’ and teachers’ home languages strategically in the teaching of English or other subjects in English have necessitated our own explorations of home language based English language teaching (HLB-ELT) pedagogical practices in local primary multilingual classrooms. Much of these practices are rooted in translanguaging pedagogy, built around learners’ everyday practices and knowledge systems.

As Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez pointed out, as early as 1992, “by capitalizing on household and other community resources, we can organize classroom instruction that far exceeds in quality the rote-like instruction these children commonly encounter in schools” (p. 132). These resources include “specific funds of knowledge pertaining to the social, economic, and productive activities of people in a local region" (p. 139) which connect children’s social environments to their classroom learning.

Teachers like Purnima are exploring the use of learners’ home languages as a resource while teaching English and Environmental Studies. By doing so they are beginning to acknowledge the inevitability of multilingualism: That multilinguals in contexts like India draw upon and employ all the languages around them in unconscious and inevitable ways to make sense of the world around them and their academic experience.

Towards Effective Home-Language-Based English Language Education

In trying to develop a systematic enquiry into multilingual classrooms for English language learning that employ learners’ linguistic and community funds of knowledge, we see a transformation in pedagogical approaches in at least three ways:

i) Replacing negative metaphors (such as surreptitious use) to describe teachers’ attitudes to home language use in the English classroom with constructive terms such as funds of knowledge.

It has long been an accepted convention in Indian schools, possibly influenced by methods and approaches such as the Direct Method and Communicative Language Teaching, that one should use only English in the English classroom. Mandates such as these, whether written or orally transmitted, have served to dislodge learners’ home languages from their academic learning environments but have not fully succeeded in keeping them out of the door. In almost all regional and EMI schools learners struggle with English, mainly because of a lack of exposure to the language, making teachers resort to using local languages to paraphrase English lessons and prepare learners for examinations. They do it apologetically, surreptitiously and self-consciously, convinced that this is incorrect behaviour, not to be admitted or endorsed (Boruah, 2022)

A pedagogical stance premised on home languages as linguistic asset is helping to wean out negative attitudes towards their use. As teachers are beginning to see an improvement in their learners’ learning graphs, their attitude towards home language use is gradually changing, allowing them to reconceptualize their pedagogy. From being led to view English language classrooms as monolingual English spaces, teachers are now being mentored to design classroom strategies that systematically draw on learners’ knowledge systems. As a result, they have gradually stopped being apologetic about using local languages in English language classrooms and have instead begun planning strategic and purposeful pedagogical activities that connect the syllabus to learners' linguistic and home-based experiences.

ii) Recasting learners as multifaceted networks of cultural knowledge rather than as “singlestranded” beings whose “wholeness” is limited “within rather limited classroom contexts” (Moll, et al., 1992, p. 133)

In most Indian classrooms the teacher is still expected to be a knowledge transmitter, whose duty is to inform and explain, while students learn best when they are quiet and attentive. These notions are deep-rooted, arising out of cultural norms and contextual challenges. Such attitudes allow little opportunity for student-led learning strategies, and with the pressure of completing the assigned syllabus, most classrooms become teacher-fronted rather than learner-centred. This is the “singlestranded-ness” which Luis Moll and his colleagues (1992) warned about, that prevents teachers from knowing their learners as whole beings.

The systematic use of translanguaging pedagogy in English language classrooms is beginning to counter the limited roles that learners have traditionally played in their own learning. When teachers design pedagogical interventions that draw on learners’ home language and knowledge, the “multiple spheres of activities” that learners engage with as part of their everyday living get transformed into classroom learning resources. One teacher, for instance, whose Grade 3 class includes Bodo, Assamese, Bengali, Nepali, Santhali and Hindi speaker learners, reported how she started engaging them in home language-based group activities which supported the English lessons. As learners played roles on sharing a tent on an outdoor trip, using home languages, communication barriers broke down, and the activity gave them an opportunity to share their community practices.

iii) Drawing on learners’ linguistic, cognitive and cultural knowledge in the English language classroom such that knowledge is obtained by the children, not imposed by the adults” (Moll, et al., 1992, p. 133, emphasis added).

The use of HLB-ELT in classrooms is providing learners with avenues to explore and exhibit themselves as fuller, multidimensional producers of language, culture and knowledge, simply by finding ways to bridge the English lessons with their own lives.

Using the English textbook Marigold with his Grade 5 learners, an EMI school teacher demonstrated how he activated his Grade 5 multilingual learners’ schema while teaching the lesson called Ice-cream Man. The lesson has an activity asking learners to list things people throw away, and find interesting ways to make them useful. The teacher realised the potential of this activity to connect the English lesson to learners’ everyday experiences. He asked his learners to design a poster with pictures of things people discard, encouraging the learners to share their knowledge and cultural practices with one another. The learners labelled the products in English and in their own languages, sometimes even using Roman script. They were then sent to the playground to collect whatever waste they found, and list ways of making it useful. The teacher reported that he was amazed by the resourcefulness of the learners, for they had found a way to pool their knowledge, and were able to put together a list of environment-friendly products such as single-use plastic packets woven into shopping bags, quilts sewed from small pieces of cloth, soil compost made from vegetable waste, cow dung shaped into cakes to light fires. They had brought their community wisdom into the classroom, sharing age-old practices, and learning an English lesson in collaboration. They had demonstrated how English language learning could also become place-based learning.

As learner communication in multilingual English classrooms has improved, their willingness to work together and draw on their communities’ meaning-making resources has increased. They are beginning to take ownership of their learning and losing inhibition to express their understanding in oral or written English. Trends such as these are very encouraging, and are likely to be adopted as sustainable pedagogy for both language learning and environmental awareness.

References

Boruah, P. (2022) Examining English teachers’ multilingual pedagogy choices: A study of teacher perceptions about using home languages in teaching English. Unpublished manuscript.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534

Government of India. (2005). National Curriculum Framework. www.ncert.nic.in/rightside/links/pdf/framework/english/nf2005.pdf

Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf

Singleton, A. (2024). Place-based Education and Multilingual Learning. UNESCO Publishing.

Padmini Bhuyan Boruah, PhD is currently Professor and Head, Department of English Language Teaching, Gauhati University, India. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of San Diego, California (2019-20), her research interests and publications include English language policy and practice in multilingual Indian contexts, language teacher education, and materials development.