Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education and Foundational Literacy Outcomes in Tribal Belt Primary Schools of Jharkhand: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Children from tribal and indigenous communities in India whose homelanguage differs from the official medium of instruction — predominantlyHindi in Jharkhand — face a "double burden" in early schooling: acquiringfoundational literacy in a language they do not yet understand whilesimultaneously developing oral proficiency in that language.Mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE), which uses the child's home language as the primary medium of early literacy instruction before transitioning to the official language, is recommended by UNESCO and the NEP 2020 as the evidence-based approach to overcoming this double burden. This comparative study examines foundational literacy outcomes across five assessment tasks in 56 schools in tribal belt districts of Jharkhand — 28 schools implementing MTB-MLE through the Jharkhand government's Tribal and Regional Language programme and 28 matched Hindi-medium schools — assessing 920 Grade 2 students. MTB-MLE schools showed significantly higher scores on oral language comprehension (+22.2 percentage points), phonological awareness (+18.6 pp), and word reading accuracy (+17.6 pp) relative to Hindi-medium schools, while letter knowledge differences were smaller (+9.6 pp). These findings provide Jharkhand-specific evidence supporting continued and expanded MTB-MLE implementation as a critical component of the FLN strategy for tribal school populations. KEYWORDS: Mother-tongue-based education, Multilingual education,Tribal education, Foundational literacy, Jharkhand, MTB-MLE, NEP 2020,Indigenous language instruction