Multilingual classrooms: opportunities and challenges for English medium instruction in low and middle income contexts

This report is the product of a research collaboration between Education Development Trust, the British Council and The Open University. Its starting point was to consider the complex field of English Medium Instruction (EMI) policies in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Its purpose is to provide insight and support to those responsible for setting policy or enacting it in complex language environments around the world. The work recognises the importance given to English language by governments in the future development of intellectual and economic capital, and to accessing opportunity in an increasingly global world. It also recognises and respects the strong argument calling for education and learning to be conducted in a language spoken by learners and teachers. Navigating these two influences can appear impossible at times as they can be unhelpfully positioned as opposites. This research study set out to do two things: • Look at the global literature and draw on the lessons from existing research. • Focus on illustrating the operational enactment and levels of understanding of EMI polices in schools in two primary school contexts – Ghana and Bihar, India. These very different contexts provide valuable lessons that will help policy makers, educators, teacher trainers and schools to navigate the complexities of multilingual EMI environments

On the Internationalization of CAD Learning Through an English Glossary

Comunicació presentada al XXIX Congreso International INGEGRAF 2019 "La transformación Digital en la Ingeniería Gráfica” (20-21 Junio 2019, Logroño - La Rioja)The internationalization of higher education is an essential factor to improve the quality and efficiency of Spanish universities, providing students with the main skills, and knowledge to interact effectively in an international and multicultural work context as professionals. The internationalization of universities must be a transversal process, not exclusive of its territorial dimension, aimed at advancing towards a society and a knowledge economy that propitiate a solid and stable model of development and growth. To this end, professors in the area of Graphic Expression for Engineering at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) have developed an online glossary of specific terms in English related to the 3D modelling CAD tools used in Graphic Engineering subjects. This new online tool seeks to train students to increase their technical vocabulary in English and improve their learning and communication skills to face possible collaborations in future European projects. The glossary is introduced weekly to the students during the course. Subsequently, a survey is conducted to the students to verify the effectiveness of the training. This work collects the results and conclusions of this analysis

Vṛddhi traces in Hindi denominal derivation

This paper considers vṛddhi as an inherited feature in Modern Standard Hindi. As a phenomenon, vṛddhi is most commonly discussed in reference to Old Indo‐Aryan (OIA), particularly with a focus on inflectional patterns in Sanskrit. However, the inherited pattern in New Indo‐Aryan (NIA) languages presents specific analytical challenges and its status as a morpho‐phonological feature in the present‐day languages is not straightforward to establish. In this paper, the focus is given to the operation of vṛddhi in denominal derivations in both OIA and present‐day Hindi. This leads to a discussion of the evolution of vowel systems in the history of Indo‐Aryan. Regarding the question of how synchronic vṛddhi‐alternations can be accounted for theoretically, I present two possibilities: (i) that vṛddhi constitutes a phonologically active process of vowel lowering/tensing in Hindi; and (ii), that vṛddhi is a suppletive phenomenon synchronically, and thus, not derived by phonological rule

Whose Amnesia? Literary Modernity in Multilingual South Asia

The debate over the impact of British colonialism and “colonial modernity” in India has hinged around questions of epistemic and aesthetic rupture. Whether in modern poetry, art, music, in practically every language and region intellectuals struggled with the artistic traditions they had inherited and condemned them as decadent and artificial. But this is only part of the story. If we widen the lens a little and consider print culture and orature more broadly, vibrant regional print and performance cultures in a variety of Indian languages, and the publishing of earlier knowledge and aesthetic traditions belie the notion that English made India into a province of Europe, peripheral to London as the centre of world literature. Yet nothing of this new fervour of journals, associations, literary debates, of new genres or theatre and popular publishing, transpires in Anglo-Indian and English journals of the period, whose occlusion of the Indian-language stories produced ignorance, distaste, indifference— those “technologies of recognition” (Shu-Mei Shih) that produce “the West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of recognition, in representation”

Pre-Independence English and Hindi Novel: A Comparative Study

Not availabl

What's in a compound? Review article on Lieber and Štekauer (eds) 2009. 'The Oxford Handbook of Compounding'

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are languages in which compounded adjectives modify just as they do in phrases (Chukchee, Arleplog Swedish), in general the adjective has a classifier role and not that of a compositional attributive modifier. Thus, even if an English (or German) adjective–noun compound looks compositional, it isn't

Scaling language competition in a small island state : graphic verbs in Seychellois Creole and English

One of the sensitive aspects of a small country is the predicament of its language. Seychellois Creole, one of that country`s three official languages and the native language of its Creole population, is asserting its linguistic identity against the globally-established English and French, the other two official languages of the country. How resilient is Seychellois Creole in this language triangle? Are the challenges it faces related to the small number of speakers, citizens of the small country? To what extent, and in what particular way, does Seychellois Creole vulnerable position, as a small language neighboured by two international languages, affect its development? These questions are approached in this paper by means of the comparative analysis of some linguistic parameters of Seychellois Creole and English. Research has been carried out with a group of English and Seychellois Creole verbs conceptualizing the process of graphic representation. The paper focuses on the capacity of the two contrasted languages for concept lexicalisation, patterns of semantic development and syntactic shifting.peer-reviewe