Assessing Impact of Translingual Pedagogic Materials on Indian ESL Teachers' Classroom Practices and Learners' Reading Comprehension

The Indian educational landscape has been witnessing a high demand for schools with English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) with an assumption that an early exposure to English will give learners a fair chance at gaining academic proficiency (Meghanathan, 2011). Young learners from low socioeconomic strata (SES), enrolled in government primary EMI schools, are taught in English

and regional languages that are not their home languages (L1). With little to no literacy support at home (Tsimpli et al., 2020) and the learning loss suffered during the pandemic, the learners are at a disadvantage with declining reading skills (ASER, 2022). Despite this monolingual imposition, teachers spontaneously mix English and the learners' mother

tongues for easy interaction but not purposefully to facilitate learning (Lightfoot et al., 2021). Although research and education policies support Multilingual Education (MLE), efforts should be made to systematically integrate L1 in the classroom to ensure positive learning outcomes. Against this backdrop, this research aims to work with fifth-grade teachers and learners from government

primary schools across three Indian states. It aims to provide pre-service and in-service teacher training on using multilingual practices and assess the impact of multilingual educational materials on learners' reading comprehension development.