Multilingual Education in India Resource Book 1 (ELI Series)

ELI series is a set of resource books and practitioner briefs by ELI (Early Literacy Initiative), TISS, Hyderabad. Comprised of five Resource books and seven Practitioner briefs, this set writings on themes ranging from decoding, comprehension to multi-lingual education and children’s literature, exploring this set explores various aspects of language learning and early literacy in India. Resource Books- About 45 original short-blog pieces, aiming at perspective-building, invited from practitioners and academics from the field, along with and approximately 150 annotations across the five themes; Multilingual Education, Children’s literature, Children’s writing, Decoding of script and Comprehension. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________India being a home to thousands of mother tongues (Menon, 2020), Multilingualism is an inseparable part of the educational scenerio in India; addressing which often becomes a matter of concern, challange and dilemma for the practitioners and academics. This and the fact it has been an under-explored area of research in Indian contexts, highlights the critical need of initiating a discussion around the topic. First of the five resource books of the ELI series, this one focuses on various aspects of Multilinguialism and Multilingual Education in India. It comprises of 10 write-ups by eminent practitioners-scholars, exploring crucial questions and cocenrns such as Linguistic diversity and ways of dealing with the diversity in classrooms, Role of Home Languages and Mother Tongues as the medium of instructions in the schools and the role of English in multilingual classrooms etc. These pieces are complimented with annotated bibliographies covering themes such as linguistic diversity in Indian classrooms, policies, planning and practices concerning multilingual education as well as resources for the practitioners.