Negotiating Multilingualism in Indian Classrooms: Teacher-Student Communication in Policy and Practice

Language-in-Education Policy and the Implementation Gap

India’s language-in-education policies have long balanced rhetorical commitments to multilingualism with persistent structural inequalities. Since the 1960s, the three-language formula has aimed to promote national integration and regional representation by requiring instruction in a regional language, Hindi, and English. Yet the formula has been unevenly implemented across states. Tamil Nadu, for instance, has consistently adhered to a two-language policy, and states like Odisha have introduced mother-tongue-based multilingual education for tribal communities (Panda & Mohanty, 2009). These regional variations reflect broader tensions between local linguistic ecologies and standardized policy models. These complexities also surface in research design itself as interdisciplinary studies on multilingual education in India grapple with methodological challenges that mirror the policy-practice disconnect (Tsimpli et al., 2019).

NEP 2020 seeks to realign this terrain; it advocates instruction in the mother tongue wherever possible until at least Grade 5 and preferably through Grade 8. This emphasis aligns with global and domestic research demonstrating that children learn best when taught in a familiar language. Evidence from large-scale studies in India and comparable multilingual contexts supports this claim, including Jhingran (2005), Mohanty (2009), and UNICEF India (McCaffrey & Jhingran, 2024). However, implementation is complicated by political sensitivities, regional linguistic hierarchies, and social aspirations. Stakeholder analyses reveal that although NEP 2020 is viewed aspirationally, teachers and students report significant disconnects between policy vision and institutional readiness (Kulal et al., 2024). Many families, particularly in urban and upwardly mobile contexts, strongly prefer English-medium schooling, viewing it as a pathway to social and economic advancement (Jayadeva, 2019; Rahman & Mehar Singh, 2020; Sah, 2020; Sahan & Şahan, 2024).

Despite the NEP’s inclusive rhetoric, infrastructural and pedagogical conditions constrain its realization. Teachers are often not proficient in students’ home languages, and many schools lack multilingual textbooks or classroom materials. In tribal areas, children may confront a triple language burden: their home language, the regional dominant language, and English. This burden reflects a layered mismatch between the language children speak, the language used for instruction, and the language of assessment, creating cumulative barriers to comprehension and participation (Jhingran, 2005; Mohanty, 2010).

These language mismatches have been linked to high dropout rates and persistent learning deficits, particularly in foundational years (Jhingran, 2005). Even when teachers attempt to adapt their communication, their strategies remain informal, unsupported, and inconsistently recognized. Assessment practices further compound the problem. Standardized assessments remain monolingual, typically aligned with dominant state languages. Students whose home languages are excluded from these assessments are at a systemic disadvantage regardless of their conceptual understanding. The validity of such assessments is questionable when learners are expected to perform in unfamiliar languages without scaffolding (Mohanty, 2009).

In many ways, the communicative disconnect between policy and practice mirrors broader educational inequities. Although state and central governments have invested in digital platforms, such as Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA), offering content in multiple languages, access remains uneven. Moreover, teacher education programs rarely include training in multilingual pedagogy or language-sensitive assessment design (National Center of Educational Research and Training [NCERT], 2006). The policy discourse often treats language as a logistical issue rather than a communicative and relational one. It focuses on which language should be used but not on how communication actually occurs in classrooms. This leaves teachers to suffer in a complex linguistic environment with minimal institutional guidance. Sengupta (2021) critiqued this instrumental framing, arguing that NEP 2020 undertheorizes language as a cultural and political force in Indian schooling.

The implementation gap is not merely technical—it is conceptual. Viewed through communicative justice, this gap reflects unequal conditions of participation that emerge when policy frameworks overlook the communicative realities of Indian classrooms. The conceptual problem stems from a policy imagination that treats languages as discrete, ranked codes rather than as overlapping repertoires used relationally in classrooms. This orientation reproduces rigid hierarchies—English over regional languages, scheduled over nonscheduled languages—and stands at odds with research emphasizing fluid multilingual practice and communicative participation.

A narrow focus on language of instruction without attention to communicative practices limits the transformative potential of multilingual education. To make NEP 2020’s vision actionable, language policy must expand to recognize the full communicative ecology of classrooms, including informal strategies, nondominant languages, and teacher agency. Doing so requires policy frameworks that move beyond compliance checklists and toward a nuanced understanding of how language mediates access, participation, and belonging in education. In multilingual education scholarship, “access” refers to the linguistic conditions that allow learners to engage with curricular content, “participation” concerns their ability to contribute meaningfully to classroom interaction, and “belonging” captures the recognition of their linguistic identities as legitimate. Research shows that all three are shaped by how schools value or marginalize students’ repertoires (Cummins, 2001).

Translanguaging as Communicative Practice and Pedagogy

Translanguaging offers one lens through which these communicative processes can be understood, illustrating how learners actively mobilize repertoires to negotiate curricular demands. As multilingualism becomes the norm in Indian classrooms, teachers and students often draw on their full linguistic repertoires to communicate. This dynamic use of language, referred to as “translanguaging,” goes beyond traditional code-switching. The term “translanguaging” was first introduced by Cen Williams (1994) in the context of Welsh-English bilingual programs and refers to the fluid deployment of linguistic resources to construct meaning and negotiate knowledge across language boundaries. The term was later expanded and popularized in bilingual education scholarship by García and Wei (2014). It shifts the focus from named languages to the learner’s agency in communication.

In India, translanguaging functions as both a communicative norm in everyday multilingual interaction and a pedagogical necessity in classrooms where students and teachers negotiate language gaps. Students from tribal or linguistic minority backgrounds often enter classrooms where instruction occurs in a dominant regional language or English. Teachers, faced with this disconnect, frequently adapt by moving between languages to make concepts intelligible. These adaptive practices are common in rural, tribal, and low-income schools, where language mismatch is pronounced and formal multilingual resources are scarce (Panda & Mohanty, 2009). Coelho (2012) emphasized that such flexible, learner-responsive communication is foundational to multilingual pedagogy and must be integrated into classroom norms. Empirical research documents such strategies across varied contexts (Probyn, 2009).

In many classrooms, translanguaging emerges through patterned routines: Teachers introduce concepts in English, elaborate in the regional language, and invite student responses in home varieties, such as Bhilodi, Kui, or Sadri. Students similarly move across languages during group tasks, peer explanation, and problem-solving, using familiar repertoires to mediate unfamiliar content.

In tribal areas of Odisha and Jharkhand, teachers alternate between Kui, Odia, and Hindi to convey subject content. In urban Delhi classrooms, English-medium teachers permit Hindi or Punjabi responses to facilitate comprehension and peer collaboration (Lightfoot et al., 2021). Although these practices are pedagogically effective, they are often informal and unacknowledged in teacher education programs or curriculum policy. Translanguaging is particularly beneficial for first-generation learners whose home language is not represented in school. For such students, learning involves not only new concepts but also new linguistic codes. These include subject-specific registers (e.g., scientific vocabulary), school-based academic Hindi or English, and standardized assessment language that differs markedly from students’ home linguistic repertoires. Translanguaging bridges these domains, allowing learners to process unfamiliar content in familiar frames. The domains include home and school languages, everyday speech and academic registers, and oral and written modes that students must navigate in classroom learning. In science education, for instance, adopting a translanguaging lens has been shown to position multilingual students as active sensemakers rather than as deficient learners, thereby expanding their engagement with disciplinary practices and disrupting minoritizing narratives (González-Howard et al., 2023). Such positioning aligns with work linking translanguaging to epistemic justice, showing how it validates marginalized learners’ knowledge-making practices (Kerfoot, 2024; Zheng & Qiu, 2022). From a communicative justice perspective, translanguaging expands students’ opportunities to participate in classroom discourse by allowing them to mobilize their full linguistic repertoires rather than restricting communication to a single dominant language.

In multilingual classrooms, communicative justice concerns whether learners are able to participate using the linguistic and semiotic resources through which they understand the world. Translanguaging can create what Wei (2018) described as a “translanguaging space,” where multilingual speakers integrate linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources to construct meaning. In such spaces, students enact what García and Wei (2014) called “translingual being,” positioning themselves as legitimate participants whose communicative identities are not confined to a single language; scholars have also described translanguaging as part of a broader decolonial orientation in education because it challenges language hierarchies that privilege dominant or colonial languages while marginalizing indigenous and community repertoires. Viewed through this lens, translanguaging supports communicative justice by expanding learners’ opportunities to interpret knowledge, express ideas, and participate in classroom discourse through their full communicative repertoires.

García and Lin (2016) argued that translanguaging centers the learner rather than the language—a shift that aligns well with NEP 2020’s emphasis on foundational understanding and inclusive instruction. However, the policy landscape has yet to reflect this shift. Most teacher education programs continue to emphasize monolingual norms, focusing on correct usage over communicative flexibility (NCERT, 2006). Many teachers are discouraged—implicitly or explicitly—from using home languages or mixing codes, particularly in English-medium settings. Canagarajah (2011) termed this the “compartmentalization” of multilingualism, which can undermine learning in linguistically diverse environments. This resistance is tied to the linguistic hierarchies embedded in Indian schooling. English and dominant regional languages are valorized, and tribal, rural, and minoritized languages are often viewed as nonacademic or deficient (Annamalai, 2001). Translanguaging between English and Hindi may be tolerated, but practices involving nonstandard or indigenous languages remain stigmatized. Similar hierarchies are documented in Nepal, where Sah (2020) showed that translanguaging involving minoritized languages is discouraged while dominant codes are legitimized.

This not only marginalizes students but also limits teachers’ pedagogical repertoire. Nonetheless, there are promising initiatives. The Multilingual Education Programme in Odisha integrates home languages into early grade instruction through bilingual materials and community engagement (Mohanty, 2010). These programs show improved retention and participation, suggesting that translanguaging can be institutionalized as a viable pedagogical approach. Similarly, García and Lin (2016) advocated embedding translanguaging in curriculum design, assessment, and teacher development not as a remediation strategy but as a normative practice. Beyond academic gains, translanguaging supports emotional and social inclusion. When teachers acknowledge and incorporate students’ home languages, they inculcate a sense of belonging and self-worth. This is especially important in schools serving historically marginalized communities, where recognition through language can act as a powerful form of educational inclusion. These practices enhance access by enabling comprehension through familiar linguistic frames, support participation by allowing learners to contribute using their full repertoires, and foster belonging by legitimizing minoritized identities, aligning with scholarship that positions translanguaging as a pedagogy of social and epistemic justice in multilingual classrooms (McKinney, 2017; Seltzer et al., 2025).

Contemporary scholarship on translanguaging reflects two complementary theoretical perspectives. The unitary repertoire perspective, associated with García and Wei (2014), conceptualizes multilingual speakers as drawing from an integrated linguistic repertoire rather than switching between separate named languages. An alternative multilingual perspective argues that named languages remain psychologically and socially meaningful categories for speakers and therefore should not be collapsed into a single undifferentiated repertoire (MacSwan, 2017). Rather than viewing these perspectives as mutually exclusive, this essay treats them as addressing different analytical levels. The unitary repertoire perspective is particularly useful for understanding everyday classroom communication in India, where teachers and students frequently mobilize overlapping linguistic resources during explanation, peer interaction, and collaborative learning. At the same time, recognizing named languages remains important for policy, curriculum design, and linguistic identity. For the purposes of analyzing communicative justice in classrooms, the unitary repertoire perspective provides a productive lens because it foregrounds learners’ communicative participation and the fluid practices through which understanding is constructed in multilingual settings.

Critics of translanguaging raise concerns about potential risks related to clarity, curriculum alignment, and long-term proficiency, arguing that unstructured translanguaging may dilute exposure to target languages or create inconsistency across classrooms (Cummins, 2021; MacSwan, 2017). Without structured materials or assessment adaptations, translanguaging may create inconsistencies across classrooms. There is also the risk of celebrating linguistic plurality in discourse while failing to invest in systemic supports, such as multilingual textbooks, trained teachers, and community outreach. Despite these caveats, the communicative value of translanguaging in multilingual classrooms is undeniable. It enables teachers to navigate linguistic complexity pragmatically, promotes student engagement, and democratizes access to content. For India, recognizing translanguaging as a legitimate pedagogical practice aligns not only with constitutional ideals of linguistic inclusion but also with global commitments to equity in foundational education. Comparative research confirms that translanguaging enhances participation and comprehension in similarly multilingual contexts outside India (Omidire & Ayob, 2022). Moving forward, the goal should not be to formalize or regulate translanguaging into rigid templates but to create conditions under which such practices are acknowledged, supported, and sustained. Doing so requires shifting the policy gaze from prescribed language use to communicative effectiveness, an essential pivot in multilingual education systems.

Teacher Strategies, Multimodal Communication, and Supports for Multilingual Pedagogy

The translanguaging dynamics mentioned previously foreground the central role of teacher agency, which becomes visible in the everyday pedagogical decisions teachers make to mediate linguistic diversity. In India, these strategies vary across regions and school types, with work in Odisha, Jharkhand, Delhi, and Hyderabad offering concrete evidence of how teachers adjust communication to local linguistic ecologies (Lightfoot et al., 2021; Panda & Mohanty, 2009).

In India’s multilingual classrooms, teachers frequently serve as frontline negotiators of linguistic diversity. Confronted with learners whose home languages differ from the medium of instruction and often lacking institutional support or structured training in multilingual pedagogy, teachers develop their own repertoire of adaptive communicative strategies. These practices are highly contextual—shaped by region, language ecology, resource availability, and teacher agency. Research shows that in the absence of materials aligned with students’ linguistic backgrounds, teachers improvise. In tribal regions of Odisha and Jharkhand, for instance, teachers incorporate oral storytelling, songs, or peer mediation in Kui, Santhali, or Odia to scaffold meaning (Panda & Mohanty, 2009). In urban government schools, English-medium instruction is often accompanied by informal Hindi explanations, allowing students to understand lessons while engaging with aspirational language norms (Bhattacharya, 2013). These communicative strategies include translanguaging, gesture-based explanations, blackboard visuals, simplified syntax, and multilingual group work. For instance, teachers may introduce a concept in English, rephrase it in the regional language, and check understanding through students’ home language responses. Others pair multilingual word walls with bilingual questioning routines, enabling learners to move flexibly between languages during explanation and problem-solving. Teachers may also identify student language leaders to support peer comprehension or conduct activities in mixed language groups. Yet despite their critical role in facilitating learning, such practices often remain undocumented and excluded from training curricula (Jhingran, 2005; NCERT, 2006). “Teacher agency” in this context refers to educators’ capacity to interpret curricular demands and redesign communication in ways that align with students’ repertoires. In multilingual classrooms, translanguaging is a key expression of such agency, allowing teachers to circumvent rigid language norms to enable understanding.

Nonverbal communication is particularly important in early grades and in classrooms where students are not yet literate in any language. Research on translanguaging pedagogy shows that meaning-making is distributed across linguistic, visual, embodied, and spatial modes. These multimodal meaning-making processes are closely related to what Lin (2019) described as “trans-semiotizing,” where learners integrate linguistic, visual, and embodied semiotic resources to construct knowledge across communicative modes in multilingual classrooms. Teachers’ use of gesture, gaze, movement, pointing, drawing, and object handling functions not merely as support for preliterate learners but also as core components of multilingual sensemaking. Such multimodal practices allow students to connect classroom discourse with familiar semiotic resources, thereby expanding their opportunities to participate (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015; García & Lin, 2016).

These multimodal techniques serve not just to transmit information but also to create relational safety and attentiveness in the classroom. Although some digital platforms, such as DIKSHA, have begun offering multilingual resources—including QR-coded textbooks, videos, and teacher training modules—their usage is uneven. Teachers in low-resource areas may lack devices, electricity, or training to access these tools. Moreover, few are designed with localized linguistic realities in mind, limiting their effectiveness in multilingual classrooms (Ministry of Education, 2020).

Importantly, the communicative ecology is shaped not just by linguistic diversity but also by linguistic hierarchy. Teachers’ willingness to use home languages is often constrained by institutional norms, community expectations, or their own proficiency. In some contexts, speaking a tribal or stigmatized language may be perceived as lowering educational status (Birney et al., 2019; Chandras, 2023). This creates a dilemma: While informal multilingual communication enhances understanding, it may conflict with the perceived prestige of English or standardized regional languages (Annamalai, 2001). Despite NEP 2020’s emphasis on foundational literacy and home language instruction, teacher education in India rarely includes dedicated modules on multilingual classroom communication. Most preservice programs treat language instruction as monolingual and focus on textbook delivery and grammar rather than flexible communication. In-service trainings, where they exist, are often too brief or generic to address the nuanced communicative demands of real classrooms (NCERT, 2006).

Innovative localized programs suggest what is possible. For example, Odisha’s Multilingual Education Resource Centre provides bilingual readers and oral language bridge materials in tribal languages. Some nongovernmental organizations have also piloted community-based language mapping tools to help teachers identify the linguistic composition of their classrooms and plan accordingly (Mohanty, 2010). However, such initiatives remain scattered and lack formal integration into state or national systems. For meaningful change, communication must be recognized as core—not peripheral—to pedagogy. This requires policy frameworks that affirm teacher agency in adapting language practices, recognize multilingual classroom interaction as legitimate pedagogy, and create systemic support for linguistic inclusion. Professional development should provide space for teachers to share practices across contexts and build a shared repertoire of communicative strategies. Ultimately, these classroom-level practices represent a form of pedagogical resilience. Teachers, often working under challenging conditions, craft communicative bridges where policy and curriculum fall short. Yet unless their efforts are acknowledged, studied, and supported, the burden of inclusive education will remain unevenly distributed—shouldered by individual teachers rather than enabled by institutional design.

Research and Policy Gaps: Toward Communicative Justice in Education

“Communicative justice” refers to the equitable distribution of opportunities to speak, be heard, and have one’s meanings recognized in institutional settings. Drawing on Fraser’s (2000) recognition framework and the “right to speak” literature (Bourdieu, 1991; Canagarajah, 2013), it foregrounds whose communicative resources are legitimized or marginalized in schooling.

In multilingual classrooms, translanguaging is central to communicative justice because it expands learners’ rights to participate by acknowledging and legitimizing their full repertoires and countering hierarchies that privilege only dominant or standardized codes. Despite growing recognition of multilingualism in Indian education, teacher-student communication remains undertheorized in both research and policy. Language continues to be treated primarily as a formal medium of instruction—codified through curriculum and assessment—rather than as a dynamic process shaped by local ecologies and classroom interaction. As a result, the communicative foundations of inclusive education remain underdeveloped.

A key research gap is the lack of systematic data on communicative practices in multilingual classrooms across regions, languages, and school types. Ethnographic studies offer valuable insights into adaptive strategies, but their scope is localized. There is little evidence at scale on how translanguaging or multilingual scaffolding affects learning outcomes or student engagement. Without such data, educational planning remains disconnected from lived pedagogical realities. Curriculum and assessment frameworks also lag behind. Although the NEP 2020 encourages mother tongue instruction in early grades, assessments are still standardized in dominant languages. This discrepancy places students from nondominant language communities at a disadvantage, affecting performance and long-term academic trajectories. Research rarely interrogates how language hierarchies embedded in testing regimes compound structural inequities. Policy debates have yet to fully confront the relational and political dimensions of language use. The privileging of English and dominant regional languages sustains existing hierarchies while marginalized linguistic identities remain unrecognized. As Rangarajan et al. (2023) showed, India’s NEP still lacks a robust framework for equitable inclusion that accounts for linguistic marginalization and its effects on quality. Communication in education is thus not a neutral act—it is embedded in questions of access, recognition, and cultural legitimacy. The silence around these dynamics reinforces exclusion, even in settings formally committed to equity.

To address these gaps, this essay proposes a shift toward the concept of communicative justice—an approach that frames educational inclusion in terms of the right to participate meaningfully in classroom discourse. Drawing on Fraser’s (2000) theory of recognition and redistribution, communicative justice implies more than access to school. It requires that students be able to engage with knowledge in forms that acknowledge their linguistic and cultural repertoires. It also entails validating the communication strategies teachers use to make education accessible across linguistic divides.

Communicative justice extends to recognizing students’ communicative repertoires, treating translanguaging not as deviation but as a legitimate mode of meaning-making through which racialized and minoritized learners assert epistemic agency and participate on equal terms.

Mendoza et al. (2023) argued that sustaining translanguaging as a transformative pedagogical stance requires contextual, equity-driven frameworks that account for local sociopolitical realities. In the same context, advancing communicative justice in India requires policy designs that respond to the country’s layered linguistic hierarchies and uneven implementation structures. Although NEP 2020 gestures toward linguistic inclusion, its operationalization remains constrained by state-level variations, dominant-language preferences, and the absence of systematic support for teachers working with tribal and minoritized languages. Bridging these gaps demands reforms that strengthen teacher preparation, expand curricular flexibility, and address inequities in assessment practices so that classroom communication—not policy abstraction—becomes the basis for multilingual inclusion. These implications follow directly from viewing multilingual classrooms through a communicative justice lens, which highlights how institutional arrangements can either restrict or expand students’ communicative rights.

Operationalizing communicative justice involves several steps. First, teacher education in India must embed multilingual pedagogies that reflect the linguistic ecologies teachers actually encounter—tribal languages, minoritized regional varieties, and mixed language urban classrooms. Preservice and in-service training should equip teachers to plan for such diversity, use translanguaging strategically, and interpret classroom communication through locally relevant linguistic and sociocultural norms rather than through monolingual expectations.

Second, curriculum and materials need flexibility to accommodate India’s layered and often competing policy frameworks—NEP 2020’s emphasis on mother tongue instruction, state-level language policies, and community aspirations for English. Allowing teachers to adapt textbooks, incorporate home language resources, and design multilingual tasks would help align classroom practice with India’s sociolinguistic realities rather than positioning teachers as operating “against” official norms.

Third, assessment reform is essential. India’s current systems privilege dominant regional or scheduled languages, which disadvantages learners whose home languages fall outside these categories. Assessments should provide multilingual scaffolds, accept responses across languages where appropriate, and evaluate conceptual understanding rather than proficiency in a single dominant code. Such changes would directly address the inequities produced by language hierarchies in Indian schooling.

Education research must also expand its methodological scope. Mixed-methods studies, discourse analysis, and participatory approaches can offer more textured insights into how communication enables or inhibits learning. Longitudinal data could illuminate how inclusive communication practices affect retention, achievement, and learner confidence over time. Finally, policy evaluation metrics should go beyond enrollment and test scores to include indicators of communicative accessibility: Do students understand classroom discourse? Can they express themselves in meaningful ways? Are teachers supported in adapting their communication to meet student needs? Achieving educational equity in multilingual societies like India demands a reconceptualization of communication as central—not peripheral—to the learning process. Communicative justice offers a lens through which linguistic inclusion, pedagogical adaptation, and structural support can be understood as interconnected imperatives. It is through this lens that the NEP’s promise of inclusive, multilingual education can be meaningfully realized.

Conclusion: Reimagining Language and Inclusion

India’s multilingual classrooms show that meaningful inclusion depends on more than selecting a medium of instruction; it requires careful attention to the communicative conditions through which teaching and learning take place. Policies such as NEP 2020 recognize the value of the mother tongue, yet they often overlook the complexity of communication in classrooms where students and teachers draw on diverse repertoires. Communicative justice highlights this gap. It directs attention to the opportunities students have to express ideas, to be understood, and to participate in ways that affirm their identities. Teachers face curriculum expectations, community pressures related to English, and their own linguistic histories. Students, especially those from tribal or minoritized communities, often work within systems that do not recognize their full linguistic resources as meaningful tools for learning. India’s scale and diversity therefore provide a valuable site for thinking about multilingual education. Scheduled and nonscheduled languages, regional hierarchies, and the strong demand for English show how communication shapes access to knowledge. Translanguaging and multimodal communication offer ways for students to contribute ideas and make sense of academic content. These practices also show that multilingualism is not only a structural or policy issue. It is also a communicative condition that influences how learners take part in lessons and how teachers organize instruction. Placing communicative justice at the center of language-in-education debates clarifies why teacher preparation, curriculum flexibility, and fair assessment practices are essential. Teacher education must account for the linguistic ecologies teachers encounter. Curricula must allow space for home languages and community knowledge. Assessment must measure conceptual understanding rather than proficiency in a single dominant code. The Indian case shows how communicative justice can support multilingual education research beyond a single national context and can be applied to other multilingual environments, including those across South Asia. The framework emphasizes communication rather than fixed language labels, and it offers a way to examine inclusion, agency, and recognition in education systems that are linguistically diverse.