Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education, Developing Content and Language Integrated Learning – Resource and Training Centre for A mulTilingual India - CLIL@India

Multilingualism defines Indian cultural landscape and is recognized as both a strength and a challenge to deal with. In a country with over 325 languages and 25 scripts as listed by the Anthropological Survey of India, English remains an aspirational language creating a base for its economic success. However, the country is caught between learning this foreign language that heralds economic success and local languages that hold cultural richness, rootedness. The situation also divides the urban and rural India in terms of language proficiencies. Caught between these two extremities of having education in either only a local/regional language or completely in a foreign language leading to slow death of language, the country looks for a fair and balanced approach for the education system to respond. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) – a methodology adopted in Europe mainly to encourage bilingualism or multilingualism comes across as an ideal solution at this point for Indian education system to adapt. Therefore, a Consortium with HEIs in India and Europe proposes the project CLIL@India. CLIL@India plans the following actions:1. Establish an international inter-institutional CLIL Resources and Training Centre at Manipal; 2. Establish satellite centres for CLIL at all participating HEIs in the project for spill-over effect; 3. Develop CLIL training materials in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and English;4. Develop and continuously update the webportal CLILatIndia.in to provide open access to CLIL study materials in India; 5. to implement the first CLIL academic modules at the Indian partner HEIs; 6. To disseminate information about CLIL methodologies developing open intensive courses and events; 6. To develop an evidence-based white-paper based on the impact of CLIL on the linguistic skills of pupils attending secondary education in India.