Multilingual E-Story Bank

Background:
After conducting a detailed baseline study of students’ language skills at the start of this academic year some major suggestions and ideas emerged such as use of multilingual resources and approaches to ensure learning for ALL, and provision of meaningful learning opportunities for students to develop their language skills. To achieve this, and to leverage our experiences and learnings from working with the KITE E-Language Lab, we decided to initiate an attempt to integrate this idea of discourse-based language learning through stories into our TIIE (Technology Integration for Inclusive Education) program. This ‘language lab’ activity was planned for the students from 3 schools where the computer lab has been set up and weekly sessions on basic digital literacy are already underway (in addition to the TIIE module implementation sessions). This weekly session is being used for piloting the ‘language lab’ activities.

Through interactions with HMs, teachers and students so far in the TIIE program, some of the needs and challenges that were identified which we feel can be addressed with the help of integrating ‘language lab’ related activities are:


 * Students not following teacher instructions and not doing homework/tasks assigned. They are struggling a lot in language.
 * Interpersonal skills seem to be gravely affected in students perhaps due to lack of opportunities for social interactions during the pandemic.
 * Activity based learning interests children but teachers don’t have much time to do this.
 * Migrant children-teachers are not familiar with their home language and find it difficult to include them
 * Teachers acknowledge that different students learn differently and have different interests but they need materials that will help them cater to individual students’ needs

Approach:
Using storytelling as a pedagogic tool. Creation of audio-visual materials in multiple languages (starting with Kannada and English but expanding this to include stories in Hindi/Urdu/Tamil/Telugu) based on the Pratham Storyweaver stories that we have been exposed to as part of the KITE E-Language Lab in order to provide students with more language inputs and opportunities for listening, speaking and reading. The audio-visual and interactive materials for students based on 10 stories have already been created. Work is currently in progress on refining this material and creating additional material. Some activities have been designed for students such as matching words to images/drag and drop, true or false, find the missing object, etc. There are also some open ended questions to which students can respond by drawing/writing/speaking out/discussing with their peers during the sessions.

How will this approach work towards inclusion and learning for ALL?

 * Facilitators allow students to respond in the language that they are comfortable in while also attempting to use a multilingual approach while conducting sessions. In this way, languages occur with fluid boundaries and facilitators recognize, and acknowledge social and cultural exclusions making students feel that their own language is of value.
 * Students with learning difficulties benefit from predictable patterns in teaching-learning processes. The ‘language lab’ approach introduces different themes and stories while maintaining some predictability in terms of expectations from students and facilitation of sessions.
 * Efforts have been made to ensure that materials are of high interest to the student and have a controlled vocabulary to help reduce frustration and increase engagement.
 * Tasks are broken down into smaller achievable units with recognition of efforts by the students.
 * Continuous and immediate feedback is given to students and they get multiple tries
 * The audio-visual materials help to grab students attention and reduce distractability.
 * Facilitators talk students through the tasks in which they face challenges and difficulties.