Monday 22 October 2018
Professor Tsimpli presented some preliminary findings of the project in the SLEG seminar. She illustrated the norm of multilingualism in India. However, learning outcomes for many school children appear low and hard to improve. Focusing on the comparison between children from urban slums with those from urban non-slum areas also from poor families, she explained the effects of medium of instruction on literacy, numeracy and cognitive skills in primary school children in India. Results from 400 children in Standard IV living in Delhi revealed that children educated in Hindi-medium schools performed better than those in Hindi/English or English-medium schools in some of the tasks. Some unexpected differences in task performance were also found in children from slum areas. Results were discussed in relation to linguistic and social factors.