Effects of English-Medium Instruction on Rural and Urban Students in India: An Evidence-Informed Synthesis and Illustrative Quantitative Model
Authors-Snehal Godfrey Andrades, Pritama Devi
Keyword-English-medium instruction (EMI); rural–urban divide; learning achievement; language profi-ciency; equity and access; government vs private schools; socioeconomic status (SES); class-room pedagogy; code-switching; multilingual education; student anxiety and engagement; India; educational policy; NEP 2020; assessment outcomes.
The English-mediated instruction (EMI) has rapidly disseminated in the Indian education system since the family has linked English with mobility and better jobs. In the meantime, the rural-urban inequalities of household resource allocation, the school facilities and the language profi-ciency of teachers in India, make it questionable that EMI may strengthen the status quo unless the language instruction and teaching subject scaffold is strong. The article is a summary of the evidence in the research and policy on EMI in India and an exemplary and supported quantitative model in rural and urban students. According to the available publications on the matter of Eng-lish input, vocabulary and reading readiness of learners at the low-socioeconomic-status group, national policy implications of multilingual instruction, we propose a conceptual framework of English multilingual instruction with regard to the learning outcomes, which is grounded on the teacher capacity, exposure to English and access to learning materials. Next, we generate a da-taset (size N =800; 4 groups: rural/urban x EMI/non-EMI) that is parameterised to reflect the patterns that are being reported in the literature (e.g., larger EMI with larger resources in urban environment). The results suggest that content learning in the rural EMI settings would be more prone to undergoing trade-offs than that in the urban EMI settings with a weak language sup-port. It has action implications highlighted in the discussion: the necessity to create teacher train-ing that is specific, the use of bilingual pedagogues (including planned translanguaging), bridg-ing courses, and changes in assessment that decouple language and content constructs. The paper concludes that EMI is neither good nor bad and its effects will depend on the quality of implementation and resourcing that is based on equity.