Midlands Graduate School DTP student Jason Anderson (University of Warwick) reporting back after his ESRC-funded Overseas Institution Visit to Ambedkar University Delhi, India.

As part of his visit Jason delivered 2 talks for lecturers and students, and also led a half day seminar ‘Translanguaging in Indian Classrooms: Now and In Future’ on 30 January 2019 with a researcher from the University of Delhi. The seminar dealt with several crucial aspects of language teaching-and-learning such as the significance of translanguaging in Indian multilingual contexts in general and ELT classrooms in particular, teachers’ beliefs and opinions about using multilingual resources, teacher education for teaching English in multilingual contexts to mention a few.

Jason also led a workshop on ‘Teaching Grammar: Exploring Different Lesson Structures’ for teacher education students. The workshop focused on the structure of grammar lesson, connect between lesson structure and prevalent frameworks of language teaching, and a critical examination of frameworks. Participating students found it extremely useful in clarifying and consolidating their training. Both the talk and the seminar were well received, generating much lively discussion and interest in a topic of great importance to language teaching around the world today.

In addition to time spent within the University, Jason undertook further activities connected with the visit which have had a positive impact upon his PhD work:

“I visited the offices of British Council (BC) Delhi on 25 January, where I had a long meeting with the Head of Teacher Education. It was extremely productive, and she was very enthusiastic about my research, particularly the plan for the participants to contribute to a co-authored publication. She is keen for BC to support this work, and with this in mind, she is interested in helping to organise an opportunity for the participants in the project to come together towards the end of it to enable them to produce the publication that is planned.

I paid 3 visits to (National Council of Educational Research and Training) NCERT Delhi offices (on 25, 26 and 29 January), meeting with 3 different experts (2 researchers and 1 teacher education specialist) where I was able to discuss the project and get insights and input from these experts, who all were willing to allow me to audio record the interviews. One of them was instrumental in helping me get permission to carry out the pilot study that followed in early February in Telangana. He also introduced me to a number of important educators in the English language teaching community in Delhi on a Saturday afternoon social event. This led to an additional meeting with an experienced academic and coursebook writer in English language teaching, who gave me useful advice for data collection in challenging contexts when we met. So the visits to NCERT were extremely useful for my research.”