-
Abstract The aim of the study was to find out to what extent low socio-economic status (SES) children enrolled in government-run primary schools in Hyderabad are ready to receive instruction through the medium of English (English medium instruction [EMI]). To this end we investigated children’s oral vocabulary skills, the lexical complexity of their textbooks, as well as the amount of English input they receive in class. A subsample of 90 children from primary school Grades 4 and 5 who opted to carry out a story retelling task in English rather than in Telugu took part in the study. Results reveal that the children’s oral vocabulary levels are far below the levels required to read the textbook materials. The lexical diversity of the children’s stories as analysed with the Index of Guiraud was also a significant predictor of their reading comprehension scores. We conclude that children from low-SES enrolled in government schools are not ready for EMI, and call for further investigation into the levels of English vocabulary knowledge that are needed for EMI.
The public schools in Uzbekistan are multilingual owing to the presence of multicultural and multi-ethnic groups in the landlocked country. The schools, through different mediums of instruction – Uzbek (80%), Russian (15%) and other languages (5%) – cater to the needs of bi-/ multilingual learners, but the English textbooks remain monolingual. So, as a part of this paper, the teachers from a public school in Uzbekistan, have prepared translingual support material based on the Grade-7 English PREPARE Book which is widely used in the schools in the country.
