2019, Iyengar, Arvind

Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in southern Pakistan and in various parts of India. In Pakistan, the language is officially written in the Perso-Arabic script – a modified version of the Arabic script. However, the minority Sindhi community in India has vigorously debated for several decades now on which script to write the language in – in Perso-Arabic, or in the Devanāgarī script otherwise widely used in India. Supporters of the Devanāgarī script emphasise its supposedly superior representation of Sindhi phonology compared to the Perso-Arabic script. However, the Sindhi language in India has been undergoing subtle shifts in phonology over the last seventy years. Because of this, certain features of the Devanāgarī script touted as an advantage by its supporters might actually hinder reading and learning, while features of the Perso-Arabic script might – somewhat ironically – lend themselves well to a pan-dialectal Sindhi orthography. This talk will explore the details of the orthographic nuances mentioned above, which are often lost in the noise of emotional debates on script, language and identity within the Indian Sindhi community. It will also outline the potential impact of phonology-orthography mismatches on pedagogy and literacy in, and maintenance of this minority language in India.

2023-03-01, Goundar, Prashneel, Ndhlovu, Finex, Iyengar, Arvind

The fieldwork component of this study comprised of academic English language tests with 120 participants and 30 open-ended in-depth interviews with first year undergraduate university students in Fiji. To this end, the fieldwork involved administering academic English language tests, using writing interventions and using these to evaluate educational inequalities faced by the students. This process was aided by the use of open-ended questions. The participants were required to sit two academic English language writing tests, one at the beginning of their first year and one at the end of the first year. This research was carried out as a longitudinal study by administrating a writing test in the second week of the first year (beginning) of their university program, followed by a second test at the end of their first year, namely, in the final week of classes in semester two of the year. The test was conducted at the beginning and at the end of their first year which lasted 1 hour. There were three writing interventions and feedback was given throughout the yearlong study. The writing interventions were academic essays, paragraph writing and summary writing. Tasks in the writing intervention involved students to write and submit to the researcher in their leisure time. I provided feedback on each of the three interventions individually to the cohort after assessing them throughout the year. Feedback involved highlighting nonstandard forms of writing style or grammar, discussing ways of improving the writing pieces and suggesting resources on academic writing. A total of 30 interviews (30 - 40 minutes each) were conducted at the end of the participants' first year via Zoom and on Skype. Volunteers from the same cohort of 120 participants were recruited at random based on their performance in the tests, both high performers as well as low performers were interviewed. The interviews were conducted after the end of the students' one-year university program.

2023-07-12, Goundar, Prashneel Ravisan, Ndhlovu, Finex, Iyengar, Arvind

This project investigates the nature and extent of educational inequalities or injustices that manifest in academic language testing evaluation regimes. The focus is on Fiji, a multilingual, multicultural country situated in the South Pacific. The major languages spoken in the country are Fijian (iTaukei), English, and Fiji Hindi. Other languages spoken in the community include Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Due to the colonial history of Fiji, English has emerged as the main lingua franca among the various ethnolinguistic groups in the country. English is also the sole medium of instruction at all three universities in the country. The dominance of English in the context of tertiary education results in a sociocultural problem when students enter universities in Fiji from a variety of high school backgrounds. Some come from urban or semi-urban high schools, while others come from rural high schools, which are located in the interior of the country and on smaller islands. Depending on the school, students may acquire different levels of English proficiency, which may leave them ill-equipped for university study. This situation directly draws attention to educational inequalities that students face at the tertiary level due to the variable levels of English language skills provided to them at the primary and secondary levels.

Drawing on the review of the relevant literature and ethnographic research, this study uses grounded theory methodologies to gain insight into the underlying educational inequalities and injustices emanating from lack of epistemic access for those university students with inadequate English language skills. To this end, the study analyses the level of difference in writing abilities at the beginning and end of the first-year of study. The findings and conclusions from this study hold key insights for informing ongoing efforts towards ameliorating educational inequalities in Fiji. The study was conducted at a university in Fiji. The first-year enrolment number was 400 students. One hundred and twenty students (30% of the student cohort) were sampled at the beginning of the first year and at the end of their first year of university program. The same cohort of 120 students was tracked throughout the project, out of which 30 students were interviewed at the end of the first year to assess the writing interventions and to gauge the nature and extent of educational inequalities faced by the participants. The interviews were analysed using grounded theory methodology to generate themes from raw data.

The study uses the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to evaluate student writing skills. The CEFR is one of the most comprehensive frameworks for language evaluation prevalent today, and has been widely used by language testing organisations in Western countries. However, since its introduction in Europe in 2001, the CEFR has so far not been applied to the unique sociolinguistic context of the South Pacific. This study is the first to do so, and gauges the framework's relevance and usefulness in a non-European multilingual context.

The outcomes of this research make significant contributions in informing policy discourse on reversing educational inequalities at the tertiary level. Firstly, it reaffirms the CEFR's capability in successfully gauging students' preparedness for English-language university study and work life. Secondly, it attests to the CEFR's suitability for use in the intensely multilingual (or plurilingual) South Pacific context. Most importantly, the study identifies four specific indicators of educational inequalities that Fijian students in higher education encounter from primary school through to high school and university that hinder the development of adequate academic English language skills. These include: (i) lack of teaching and learning resources, (ii) language barriers, (iii) problems with the medium of instruction, and (iv) shortage of experienced teachers. Although these indicators of educational inequalities are reported in comparable studies from other parts of the world, they are significant findings for this study, not least because the South Pacific is a geographical locale where individual nation-states such as Fiji consist of several islands with unique socio-cultural formations and complex linguistic landscapes.

The methodological contributions and the unique data set of the study will advance scholarly and social policy conversations on this topic. Through analysing the rich narrative stories of research participants and qualitative data, the study makes an original contribution to the body of knowledge on how grounded theory research methodologies can be applied to a longitudinal language testing research context. At present, language testing in higher education relies on data from conventional formative and normative assessments. Approaches such as grounded theory and longitudinal research design have rarely been used in intensely multilingual contexts such as the South Pacific. The findings of this study hold promise in informing higher education policies for improving support systems to enhance the smooth transition of multilingual students from high school through to university and into the workforce.

2019, Iyengar, Arvind

Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in southern Pakistan, and as a minority language in various parts of India. In India, the language has been undergoing subtle shifts in phonology over the last seventy years, resulting in the emergence of two distinct varieties of the language identifiable with older and younger speakers of the language.
This talk will throw light on the details of the intergenerational changes in phonology, and how it has influenced the morphology and lexicon of the language. The talk will conclude with a summary of potential impacts on the teaching and learning of this minority language, and seek ideas from the audience on potential ways forward.

2024-07-23, Iyengar, Arvind

In contemporary English, the meaning of education has become largely synonymous with literacy. This is evident in expressions like ‘well-read’, insinuating that someone who is intelligent or well-educated must have read widely. By extension, such a person is necessarily highly literate. In Classical Sanskrit, however, the term equivalent to English ‘well-read’ is bahuśruta, literally “well-heard” (Rocher, 1994, p. 12). Innate in the Sanskrit term is the notion that an intelligent or well-educated person has imbibed much of their knowledge through the oral mode, with the written form of language playing only a subsidiary role. This notion is echoed in Sanskrit proverbs of the following kind, which remain popular even today.

2013, Iyengar, Arvind

The Sindhi community in India numbers about 2.5 million and has settled in various parts of the country-mostly urban areas such as Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Ahmedabad. Previous studies that have researched the linguistic habits of the Sindhi community in India (Khubchandani 1963, Daswani & Parchani 1978; Daswani 1985, Parchani 1998) largely suggest that there is progressive inter-generational heritage language shift among urban Sindhis, many of whom have adopted either English or Hindi as the home language. However, most of the literature regarding such shift is based on empirical data, and has stopped short of actively exploring the mindset of such Sindhis who have undergone heritage language shift.

2013-09-27, Iyengar, Arvind

The Urdu letters and words described in this book are each accompanied by a pronunciation key in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Please refer to these IPA keys for the exact pronunciation of a Urdu letter or word.

The IPA is a scientific notation used for accurately transcribing the sounds of most human languages. More about the IPA can be found at http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa .

The similarities describedin this book between the pronunciations of Urdu letters and 'corresponding' English letters are only guidelines and should be considered as such.

2013, Iyengar, Arvind

This is part of a series of keyboard layouts for entering text in South Asian writing systems on PC/Windows platforms.

2012, Iyengar, Arvind

2016, Iyengar, Arvind

This paper deals with the pronouns, person-number-gender (PNG) and certain tense-aspect-modality (TAM) markers of Hebbar Tamil, a Tamil variety spoken by the Hebbar Iyengar community. This is a Brahmin community traditionally based in the southern regions of Karnataka state, particularly in the districts of Haasan, Tumkur, Mandya, Kolar, Bangalore and Mysore. There are no reliable statistics on the number of speakers of this variety of Tamil. The language essentially comprises a substratum closely related to standard Tamil, but with considerable lexical influence from Kannada. All the language varieties in question belong to the Dravidian family of languages.