In the Action Research Mentoring Scheme (ARMS) project, The British Council awards grants for the purposes of the action research grant scheme to support teacher educators and academics as they mentor a small group of English language teachers through classroom-based research projects, in the area of multilingual teaching. The programme started in June 2024 and will run for 12 months.

This scheme aims to create an environment and framework that enables teachers to:

  • try out different approaches and ideas 
  • develop their reflective practice
  • make choices and decisions about their teaching styles
  • develop their confidence
  • improve their student learning.

 Applications were invited from institutes/organisations across India, specialising in the area of English Language Teaching. 

Awardees for 2024-25 

  • Department of English Language Teaching (ELT), Gauhati University 
  • Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram 
  • National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal 

Department of English Language Teaching (ELT), Gauhati University

Project title: Using translanguaging strategies to develop multilingual learners’ English language skills in an EMI context in Assam 

Project overview and objectives: 

Through this project, the researchers hope to mentor teachers teaching English (as a subject and as a medium of instruction) in multilingual classrooms to explore ways in which they can support the English language development of their learners using translanguaging strategies. Translanguaging may be defined as “our use of any or all of the resources (words, bits of grammar, paralinguistic features, etc.) in our full linguistic repertoire – including all the languages we speak – to maximize communicative potential (Canagarajah, 2011; García, 2009)” (Anderson, 2023, p. 46).  

With the National Education Policy’s (2020) focus on multilingual literacy development, the objectives of the project are to enable the teacher participants to: 

  • explore the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of their learners to plan effective and inclusive teaching activities for or in English that honour all children’s home languages 
  • identify the strategies already used by learners to learn English or other subjects in English and assess in what ways these strategies aid English proficiency development 
  • design and try out translanguaging strategies with multilingual learners 
  • analyse the efficacy of these activities in improving the learners’ English skills 
  • reflect on the action research experience and its usefulness in their own teaching contexts. 

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram

Project title: Designing Translanguaged Language Learning Materials for Multilingual Indian ESL Classrooms 

Project overview and objectives: The study aims to mentor ESL teachers to design and implement translanguaging pedagogy and understand how translanguaging pedagogy enhances the students’ metalinguistic awareness in Tamil medium schools in Tamil Nadu, India. Two units (six chapters) from English language textbooks designed by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), Tamil Nadu will be analysed by the team and the teachers will be mentored to develop two units (six chapters) into a translanguaging pedagogy and multilingual instruction material will be prepared by the team of English teachers. The translanguaging pedagogy will focus on the following aspects: 

  •  use of bilingual texts (Tamil and English) 
  •  bilingual language instruction
  •  bilingual language tasks.  

 The translanguaging pedagogy will enable the teachers and students to notice morphemes, morphology,syntax and semantics of both languages (Tamil and English) and encourage them to draw from the linguistic repertoire of both languages. In addition to the implementation of the translanguaging pedagogy, the study will also mentor teachers to: 

  • write teachers’ self-reflective journal entries to understand teachers’ perspectives  
  • mentor team of teachers in each school to engage in peer feedback
  •  infer the students’ and teachers’ view on translanguaging pedagogy.

National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal

Project title: Effective use of multilingualism in classrooms: a study in Telangana state 

 Objectives of the project 

  • make teachers aware of what, why, and how of exploratory action research 
  • provide an opportunity to find solutions to their classroom problems.  
  • enable networking with teachers in other districts  
  • help teachers understand the importance of CPD and make them professionally active  
  • provide an opportunity to build a community of practice in the state of Telangana.  
  • make the teachers in Telangana aware of multilingualism in language acquisition 

 
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