Friday, November 15, 2013

English impact in rural India -- Report

A new report has just been published -- Viven Berry (ed.), English Impact Story: Investigating English Language Learning Outcomes at the Primary School Level in Rural India (London: British Council 2013). The 74-page report is available as a PDF on the ASER website amidst several other reports.

This collaboration between ASER, British Council and Pratham consists of the following essays:
  • Foreword by Martin Davidson: "There is a growing interest in what the world's children are learning and how this learning can be measured and assessed."
  • Message by Madhav Chavan: "Working with children, Pratham has identified another challenge for learning English – the fact that many Indian children have difficulty reading their own language."
  • Message by Rob Lynes: "However, research shows that all’s not well with English learning across India, especially at the primary level where the foundations are supposed to be laid."
  • Introduction by Ranajit Bhattacharyya and Debanjan Chakrabarti: "While this report is primarily for those involved in the framing and implementation of English language policy in education systems in India, it has wider implications for countries with a similarly wide cache of multicultural and heteroglossic capital."
  • "Multilingualism in an international context" by Jason Rothman and Jeanine Treffers-Daller: "They illustrate how being able to communicate using several languages benefits society through fostering intercultural understanding; they also outline the cognitive advantages gained by multilingual individuals who switch between languages on a daily basis." (From the Introduction)
  • "An English for every schoolchild in India" by Raghavachari Amritavalli: "It is common sense to use our existing knowledge, including the knowledge of other languages, to help us make sense of what is said or written in the new language. One’s other languages can also help to scaffold expression in the new language."
  • "Evolution of the ASER English tool" by Rukmini Banerji and Savitri Bobde: "The evidence generated in all three years points to the fact that language reading skills, both in regional language and even more so in English, need urgent attention throughout India."
  • "English language learning outcomes at the primary school level in rural India: taking a fresh look at the data from the Annual Status of Education Report" by Jamie Dunlea and Karen Dunn: "The paper describes the application of various statistical analysis techniques to investigate trends in English as a second or foreign language (L2) reading performance over time, as well as the relationship between first language (L1) literacy and L2 reading ability."
  • "Looking back and looking forward" by Barry O’Sullivan: "The view, therefore, that emerges from the three chapters that set the background to this report, is that while English is a hugely important element of the educational process in India, its true value should be seen in terms of its role in the multilingual society that is India."

Friday, October 4, 2013

Edu-crisis a threat to national security

The other day, in a talk at Manthan Samvaad called "India's Faultlines" (reported here), Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management outlined some of the "multiple vulnerabilities" that the country faces. Among them, he noted, is an education system that is failing to impart skills and knowledge.

The evidence that he presented is familiar to readers of this blog. Here is some of the evidence from my article "The English-Only Myth: Multilingual Education in India" (Rao 2013; abstract here).

ASER reports. In 2012, in rural India, only 45% of enrolled students in the fifth grade were able to read a grade two text. That is, 55% are not able to do even that. Over half of the children are at least three grade levels behind where they should be. Further, this is a declining trend -- over 50% students were able to do this task in 2008. This is in rural India, and mostly in the mother tongue (ASER 2013).

The EI-Wipro study. What about India’s “elite” schools? In 2011, Educational Initiatives and the IT company Wipro together published Quality Education Study (QES), a study of 89 “top schools” (as the report called them) -- all urban-Indian, and English-medium. It concluded that “performance in class 4 is found to be below international average.” However, Indian students catch up in the eighth grade, “mainly due to their higher achievement in procedural questions (i.e. questions that require straightforward use of techniques or learnt procedures to arrive at the answers).” (EI-Wipro 2011)

This study also compared students in these schools to an earlier study (conducted by the same organizations). As in the ASER reports (noted above), “learning levels were found to be significantly lower than what was observed in 2006 in the same schools tested and on the same questions.” The fall was highest in maths and English. The study remarks: “our top schools don’t promote conceptual learning in students. QES results show that there has been a further drop from the already unsatisfactory levels of 2006.”

The PISA study. Sahni did not mention this study. A recent international comparison was the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test which compared 15-year-old boys and girls from 74 countries and territories in maths, science and reading; India figured 73rd (ahead of Kyrgyzstan). Students from only two Indian states participated. The report concluded that “the 15-year-old student populations in Tamil Nadu-India and Himachal Pradesh-India were estimated to have among the lowest reading literacy levels of the PISA 2009 and PISA 2009+ participants with more than 80% of students below the baseline of proficiency. Around one-fifth of students in these economies are very poor readers” (Walker 2011: 22; also see Pritchett 2012).

This comprehensive, systemic failure, Sahni concludes is producing large numbers of unemployable young people. He sees this as a "volatile group" whose disempowerment is fertile ground for violence and recruitment into insurgency.

References (all links valid as of October 2013)

ASER (Annual Status of Education Report). 2013b. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2012. http://www.asercentre.org/education/India/status/p/143.html

EI-Wipro. 2011. Quality Education Study. Educational Initiatives and Wipro. http://www.ei-india.com/wp-content/uploads/Main_Report-Low_Resolution-25-01.pdf

PISA (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment). 2009. Database PISA 2009: Interactive Data Selection. http://pisa2009.acer.edu.au/interactive.php

Pritchett, Lant. 2012. “The First PISA results for India: The end of the beginning”. Ajay Shah’s blog. 5 January. http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2012/01/first-pisa-results-for-india-end-of.html

Rao, A. Giridhar. 2013. "The English-Only Myth: Multilingual Education in India", Language Problems and Language Planning, 37.3: 271-279. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.37.3.04rao. Abstract: http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lplp.37.3.04rao/details

Sahni, Ajai. 2013. "India's Faultlines", talk at Manthan Samvaad, Hyderabad, India, 2 October. Abstract: http://www.manthansamvaad.com/AjaiSahni.html

Walker, Maurice. 2011. PISA 2009 Plus Results: Performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science for 10 additional participants. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER Press. https://mypisa.acer.edu.au/images/mypisadoc/acer_pisa%202009%2B%20international.pdf

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Over 780 languages and 66 scripts in India - PLSI

It is a year since our last post on the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), and we have the welcome news that the 50 volumes of the Survey will appear between September 2013 and December 2014.

Ganesh N Devy, Chairperson PLSI, announced this in press conferences in Kolkata and Guwahati in July. As the report in The Hindu said: "There are over 780 languages and 66 different scripts in India. Arunachal Pradesh is the richest among the States with 90 languages.... Researchers found that Assam with 55 languages, Gujarat 48, Maharashtra 39, and West Bengal 38 are among the most linguistically diverse States.... The survey, Dr. Devy said, has revealed that the north-eastern parts of the country have one of the highest per capita language densities in the world."

A report in The Telegraph informs us that there are "130 living languages, including variants, in five states of the Northeast, some of them probably spoken by only four or five people".

Reflecting on this, another report quotes Devy as saying, "While it surely is a fact to celebrate the diversity of the country, the sad part is we have lost nearly 250 languages in the last 50 years or so."

Indeed, as Dr Devy remarked in a February 2013 interview: "While PLSI would easily be the world’s largest language survey, let me tell you that I am not proud of doing it. It was like going for rehabilitation work after an earthquake. It should have been done 50 years ago....

"We called a confluence of language experts in Vadodara in 2010 and called the place ‘ground zero’. This term (ground zero) was widely used by victims of the nuclear attacks in Japan in World War II. India, and the world, is becoming a graveyard of languages and we wanted to draw attention to that."

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Nitobe Symposium on Languages and Internationalization in Higher Education

The 6th Nitobe Symposium is on "Languages and Internationalization in Higher Education: Ideologies, Practices, Alternatives", July 18-20, 2013, at the National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.

From the Symposium website: "The symposium will be particularly concerned with the expanding use of English-medium instruction in higher education and the repercussions, positive and negative, of this development. The symposium will also examine alternative approaches."

Organized by the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CRD),  the Symposium's multilingual Background Papers themselves are useful reading. And here is the list of Paper Summaries.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Test scores and future economic success

Last year's first post was called "India's crisis in learning" and cited the country's poor performance in the international education-comparison tests PISA.

Now, writing in New Scientist MacGregor Campbell tells us that "the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA)."

Worse, "[i]n many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure"! Summarizing a 2007 study, he says,
Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless".
Which is not to say that math, science and language skills are not important. But perhaps we should stop fixating on performance in these tests. For, as Cambell notes:
in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.
Of course, none of this is grounds for any complacency about the education system in India! Let us see what this January's ASER report brings.