Lina Mukhopadhyay

Professor Lina Mukhopadhyay is Head, Department of Training and Development, School of English Language Education at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. She has a PhD in second language acquisition.

Her areas of research interests are bi/multilingual education, second language acquisition, second language writing and language assessment and evaluation. She has publications in each of these areas. She has worked with Professor Ianthi Maria Tsimpli on the MultiLiLa project, a four-year interdisciplinary research that has examined cognitive, linguistic and mathematical abilities of multilingual Indian learners and attitudes, language choices and practices of language and mathematics teachers.

At present she is working with Professor Tsimpli on two projects in India, one on teacher training and another on the impact of training on reading development of multilingual learners through the translanguaging pedagogy.

Talk summary | SHAPE Live 24 May 2022

In my talk I’ll share a translanguaging model to support lexical threshold development and reading for comprehension. In India, many children from families with low socioeconomic status attend government-run schools where English is the official medium of instruction. These children are required to show reading development in English, while lack of literacy practices and exposure to the target language at home makes reading development a challenging task. However, the first-language resources of these children can be tapped and weaved into reading development instruction. I’ll show how use of translanguaging pedagogy, including systematic and planned alternations between the learners’ first languages and the language of instruction, can be used to pave a way out of the problem.