Thursday 14 June 2018
Professor Ianthi Tsimpli was invited by Language at Leeds to give a talk "Multilingualism and multiliteracy in primary school children in India: Linguistic and cognitive effects" at the University of Leeds. She introduced her project that seeks to understand how structural and language inequalities affect educational quality. Language inequalities arise because a large number of children in India are deprived of receiving mother-tongue support, being instructed only in the regional language and English, often from teachers with poor teaching qualifications and practices or limited knowledge of the language of instruction. Teaching practices in India are teacher- and textbook-centred with detrimental effects on the development of critical thinking and problem solving abilities. These skills are fundamental in every learning process including numeracy and the understanding of mathematics. Her talk also reported preliminary findings from 9- to 11-year-old children from unprivileged backgrounds.