Language and multilinguality have been the focus of a lot of work in the past two decades across the world. This work has brought to the fore that the human mind is inherently multilingual. Multilingual learning leads to enhanced analytical skills, cognitive abilities, language proficiency and scholastic achievement. Language is also integrally related to thought and the identity of a person. Multilinguality and multiculturality are interrelated and its history and culture go a long way in developing the language better. It is important to respect the language, identity and social milieu of the child while teaching new languages, rather than substituting the home language by new languages of the politically powerful.
India is at a great advantage as it is naturally multilingual with over 1600 languages across 4 language groups or families. Madhya Pradesh being at the heart of the country has migratory populations (and therefore varied languages) from across the country.
It is established that if a child is exposed to say four languages simultaneously, then the process of learning all four languages will be similar for the child.
After two decades of working at developing proficiency levels in two major languages Hindi (regional) and English, Eklavya now believes that it is possible to learn new languages at the same time nurturing the home language. Therefore this program aims at including multi lingual books, reading and reference material in the curriculum along with different activities and facilitating teacher proficiency in multi linguality.
For the proposed program, Eklavya initially has chosen Bhopal as its area. Bhopal, being the state capital has a perfect mix of varied languages and communities to be taken as a sample for the study. The team has shortlisted 6 schools (government, private, girls, community and informal / parallel teaching school) to observe the language usage in class transaction, to collect, document, analyze and decode resource material from class and communities the students live in and finally to reach a module in a multi lingual friendly classroom.