Manpower information

A description of the NAL nominal roll database (listing basic information about NAL employees) created using the Ingres relational database software. Using this database it is possible to provide a wide variety of reports about NAL staff, respond to a wide assortment of queries and undertake elementary statistical analysis to tabulate (and pictorially depict) the average age of NAL scientists, the future retirement pattern of NAL employees etc

Periyar: Forging a Gendered Utopia

The category of gender has perennially found itself at the margins because of its social location across South Asia. Albeit heterogeneous by nature, women have borne the burden of history, community, tradition and even geography being violently mapped across their bodies. No wonder that the past two centuries has witnessed heated debates on the women’s question in the region ranging from the Altekarian paradigm to the valorized mother figure who is ever nurturing and generous. Many social reformers both male and female sought to battle orthodoxy, religious chauvinism and caste-based status-quoism widening the contours of gender justice in the process. The tropes revolved around consent and coercion, public battles over scriptural legitimacy and contentious traditions. The reformers were treading on delicate grounds as the sacred domain of the ‘home’ had to be kept immune from any polluting winds of ‘western’ ideology. This article is an attempt to tease out E.V. Ramasamy Naicker’s (Periyar) radical understanding of the gender question and his efforts to create an alternate epistemology to question existing socio-cultural realities. It concludes by arguing that this gendered utopia is also a work in progress

Language and literacy learning in early years: what should it look like?

Raju , a 6 year old boy, looks intensely at a picture of an elephant shown to him by his teacher. “What is this picture?”, asks the teacher in Kannada. “Aane” (elephant), responds Raju, a native speaker of Kannada. The teacher looks puzzled for a minute when she realizes that he is right; but the word “aane” doesn’t fit into the sequence of letters she is supposed to be teaching! “Yes, you’re right”, she says, “but there is another word for it – Salaga (tusker). What is the word?” Raju does not respond. “Salaga”, emphasizes the teacher, making Raju repeat it after her, before moving on to the next picture. After going over three more pictures, the teacher returns to the first card. “What is this?”, she asks. “Aane” (elephant), says Raju. “Yes, correct, but remember I taught you another word – Salaga – for it? Say Salaga.” Raju repeats obediently. Three more picture cards later, Raju sticks to “aane” when prompted. The teacher is getting increasingly impatient. In the final round of questioning, Raju responds to the picture card with, “I don’t know.” 2 Vignette drawn from field work done on the LiRIL project, Feb 201

Teaching early language and literacy the question of relevance

There is a puzzling problem in Indian classrooms. It is this: curious, alert, socially capable children come into our classrooms year after year and somehow we manage to teach them in a way that a significant percentage of them lose their interest to learn within the first three years of school education. Is it surprising, then, that every large-scale assessment conducted in the last dozen years in our country shows that many children cannot even read or write at a basic level, even though they have progressed to higher grades? The noted psycholinguist, Jim Gee, pointed to this absurdity that also happens regularly in American classrooms: children who spend years struggling to acquire a comfortable knowledge of, say, the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet (and the rules to apply them to reading), can miraculously learn hundreds of abstract symbols and rules in a matter of weeks when you give them video games to play

Language and literacy in draft National Education Policy (DNEP), 2016

In this paper, we take a brief look at how language and literacy have been addressed in the 43- page document – Some Inputs for Draft National Education Policy (MHRD, 2016b; hereafter DNEP)

Envisioning ‘Prabuddha Bharat’: A Discourse for Social Transformation

Editoria

The teachers’ guide to literacy research, part 2 : reading comprehension

We are all aware of the worryingly low reading levels of children in the country. In order to be able to improve the teaching and learning of literacy, we need to understand why children are facing difficulties. A research study called LiRIL (Literacy Research in Indian Languages) was designed after a national consultation on Early Literacy in 2011 to investigate this

ARE THERE ALTERNATIVES IN READING TEXTBOOKS? AN EXAMINATION OF THREE BEGINNING READING PROGRAMS

The first-grade components of three textbook programs-mainstream basal, combined phonics and literature, and phonics emphasis-were compared on cognitive load (e.g., number of different words) and linguistic content (e.g., number of monosyllabic, simple vowel words). Three levels of three components of a program-literature anthologies, decodable texts, and leveled texts-were compared. Texts of the mainstream basal program grew in length but had similar cognitive load and linguistic content across levels and components. The phonics and literature program had numerous decodable texts initially but, at later levels, emphasized a literary anthology and leveled texts that were similar to the mainstream basal program. The phonics-only program had decodable texts with small numbers of unique words. Its literature, however, had no clear connections to the words of decodable texts

Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRIL): Research report of a Study of Literacy Acquisition in Kannada and Marathi (2013-2016)

The need for longitudinal studies of early literacy in Indian contexts, especially in contexts of social and economic disadvantage, emerged as a strong theme during discussions at the national consultation on Early Literacy sponsored by Tata Trusts (Tata Trusts, New Delhi, April, 2011). Shortly thereafter, it was decided that Tata Trusts, in collaboration with two Tata Trusts partners and Dr. Shailaja Menon (of Azim Premji University), would undertake a longitudinal project on early literacy in Indian languages. Piloting for the project began immediately thereafter and continued over the next two years (2011-2013). The longitudinal data collection for the project began in September, 2013 in collaboration with two Tata Trusts partners, QUEST (Wada, Maharashtra) and Kalike (Yadgir, Karnataka), and continued until March 2016. To arrive at an in-depth, progressive understanding, it was decided that this project would track a cohort of students as they moved from Grades 1-3. Analyses from the three years of data collection are ongoing. Rather than being a single study, LiRIL, with its focus on the aforementioned five areas, is an umbrella project answering multiple research questions. LiRIL’s work has focused on economically disadvantaged districts because we have a deep interest in understanding these contexts, in the hopes of eventually designing relevant interventions for those who most need it. The learnings from the project, therefore, may not be generalizable to the overall population of these states; nevertheless, they provide focused points of insight and input into the strengths and challenges of language teaching in disadvantaged districts within the states

Dementia diagnosis in seven languages: the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III in India

OBJECTIVE: With the rising burden of dementia globally, there is a need to harmonize dementia research across diverse populations. The Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-III (ACE-III) is a well-established cognitive screening tool to diagnose dementia. But there have been few efforts to standardize the use of ACE-III across cohorts speaking different languages. The present study aimed to standardize and validate ACE-III across seven Indian languages and to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the test to detect dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in the context of language heterogeneity.  METHODS: The original ACE-III was adapted to Indian languages: Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Tamil, and Indian English by a multidisciplinary expert group. The ACE-III was standardized for use across all seven languages. In total, 757 controls, 242 dementia, and 204 MCI patients were recruited across five cities in India for the validation study. Psychometric properties of adapted versions were examined and their sensitivity and specificity were established.  RESULTS: The sensitivity and specificity of ACE-III in identifying dementia ranged from 0.90 to 1, sensitivity for MCI ranged from 0.86 to 1, and specificity from 0.83 to 0.93. Education but not language was found to have an independent effect on ACE-III scores. Optimum cut-off scores were established separately for low education (≤10 years of education) and high education (>10 years of education) groups.  CONCLUSIONS: The adapted versions of ACE-III have been standardized and validated for use across seven Indian languages, with high diagnostic accuracy in identifying dementia and MCI in a linguistically diverse context