The Multilingualism and Multiliteracy (MultiLila) project was a four-year research study (2016 –2020).It aimed to examine whether a match or mismatch between the child’s home language(s) and the school language affect learning outcomes while at the same time taking into other factors that can affect a child’s performance on basic school skills and more advanced, problem-solving and reasoning skills. Specifically, socioeconomic status, school site, urban vs. rural location and differences between two urban sites (Delhi and Hyderabad) were considered when evaluating learning outcomes in the project’s tasks. The project also sought to understand whether children who use more than one language in the home or children who live in linguistically highly diverse environments have better cognitive skills than children in monolingual or less diverse contexts. A variety of quantitative and qualitative data were collected over a period of four years. The data include children’s performance on the fourteen different tasks of literacy, numeracy, oral language, verbal reasoning, and cognitive tasks mentioned above. In addition, we collected data from the surveys and questionnaires used for teacher and head-teacher interviews.This innovative project examines the causes of low educational outcomes in schools in India where many children fail to achieve basic literacy and numeracy levels, while dropout rates, affecting girls more than boys, are very high. A starting point of this research is that bilingualism and multilingualism have revealed cognitive advantages and good learning skills in children raised in western societies. Multilingualism is the norm in India. However, rather than enjoying cognitive and learning advantages, multilingual Indian children show low levels of basic learning skills including critical thinking and problem-solving. This project is innovative in seeking to disentangle the causes of this paradox. The project builds on Tsimpli's large scale (600K) EU-funded THALES bilingualism project which assessed cognitive and language abilities of 700+ children in five different countries, expanding this project into numeracy, critical thinking and problem solving in multilingual children which are key elements in the Indian context. The PI and co-Is have been preparing this application for the last two years in conjunction with the current project partners and consultants in India with 20k. funding from the British Council and 3k funding from the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading. The PI was invited to take part in a Roundtable discussion on Multilingual Education at the British Council in September 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXMhAzgcdzM).The applicants discussed key questions from charities and schools and obtained advice from a range of educational and linguistics experts in Delhi and Hyderabad and visited different schools in both cities in 2014-15. The key question this project seeks to address is to explore how the complex dynamics of social, economic and geographical contexts affect the delivery of quality multilingual education in India. The growth of literacy and numeracy in children is constrained by complex interactions between elements of the education system, the context in which they are embedded, and the dynamics operating within that system. By conducting research among children living in urban slums in Delhi and Hyderabad as well as in remote rural areas of Bihar where food deprivation, low sanitation, poverty and migration make school attendance and education hard to maintain, the project focuses on structural and language inequalities affecting educational quality in India. Language inequalities arise because a large number of children in India are deprived of receiving mother-tongue support, being instructed only in the regional language and English, often from teachers with poor teaching qualifications and practices or limited knowledge of the language of instruction too. Teaching practices in India are teacher- and textbook-centred with detrimental effects on the development of critical thinking and problem solving abilities. These skills are fundamental in every learning process including numeracy and the understanding of mathematics. The method of this study is highly innovative in a number of ways. A combination of several tasks and questionnaires will address the role of several factors on learning outcomes. Each child's language, literacy and numeracy skills will be evaluated at two time points with a one year interval between them. This design is known to provide reliable findings on the development of learning rather than only on knowledge itself allowing future interventions to build on these findings to ensure improved outcomes. This study will provide policymakers and practitioners with concrete ideas on how to improve learning outcomes in the multilingual education context of India. It will offer a crucial understanding of how these ideas will translate to their specific contexts and institutions in India across regions and states. At the same time, the project will also inform UK stakeholders about educating bilingual children in the UK.

Data was collected from children in Stds IV and V. The design of the study included a comparison between urban areas (Delhi and Hyderabad) with town and non-remote rural areas in Patna, while urban children are further divided into those attending schools in slum and non-slum areas. We recruited children from government schools only because our aim was to better understand the interaction of lower socioeconomic status, location, medium of instruction, and school or teaching resources with children’s school, language, and cognitive development. All tasks were behavioural. In total, 741 children from Delhi and 780 children from Hyderabad were tested at two points in the same calendar year, namely when the children were attending Std IV and Std V respectively. A short longitudinal design has been adopted to address the development of language, literacy, numeracy, cognitive functions, critical thinking, and problem solving over two years in children with different amounts of mother tongue literacy in schools in remote rural India and urban slums along with an equal number of children from rural (non-remote) and urban (non-slum). For such purposes, our project employs innovative research methodologies creating new datasets with mixed quantitative and qualitative methods such as the combination of a large range of tasks measuring the relative role of internal factors ( e.g., cognitive, metacognitive abilities of the child) and external factors (e.g., SES, geographic factors, teacher training and qualifications) on learning outcomes. This is the first study to combine such a large range of tasks and will enable an in depth investigation of the role of internal and external factors on learning outcomes in India; the recruitment of a large number of children across three different states, which makes the study representative and the development of several language, literacy, and critical thinking tasks for various languages in India. Sampling will be from a small number of schools in each site so that the school factor is controlled.