Foundations of Multilingualism in Formative Years: School Education in Himachal Pradesh (2019)

This study attempts to explore the ways by which primary school children of Himachal Pradesh are expected to learn languages – namely Hindi and English – within the formal setup of their schools. While Hindi is the language that is rooted within children’s familiar and familial zones, English is a foreign language. However, the demand for learning English is very high. It emerged from classroom observations that textbooks were the sacrosanct resource for teaching and learning of English and Hindi in primary schools – although they were of questionable quality. A set of recommendations that emerged from teachers’ interviews highlight the importance which the teaching community attributes to the use of local dialects, and a variety of reading formats which should be used in classrooms to promote the quintessence of multilingualism.