How does language function as a source of exclusion in schooling?

Concept — Exclusion in schooling is any routine practice that quietly denies a learner meaningful access to participation, understanding and assessment, even when no rule formally bars that learner. Language becomes such a practice when the school treats one standard language as the only legitimate medium of learning, so that a child’s home language is read as a deficit to be replaced rather than a resource to build on.

The policy statement of the same principle: NCF 2005 treats the multilingual classroom as a resource, and NEP 2020 recommends that, wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5 be the home language, mother tongue or local language — on the ground, as the policy puts it, that young children learn and grasp non-trivial concepts more quickly in their home language or mother tongue.

Application — When the teaching, the questioning and the testing all proceed in a language the child does not yet command, the child has to decode the medium and the new subject content at the same time. Comprehension slows, participation drops, silence is read by the teacher as inability, and the gap widens with every lesson. Nothing is formally denied; the child is simply pushed to the margin of the classroom. That is exclusion by omission, and the condition that produces it is instruction that ignores students’ home languages and linguistic backgrounds.

Contrast — The other practices named here run in the opposite direction. Each keeps a bridge open between the language of the home and the language of the school:

• Multilingual glossaries and examples in textbooks: the familiar term stays available beside the new one, so meaning is not lost while the vocabulary is being learnt.

• Flexible language-support programmes: bridge time, graded material or a resource teacher is provided while command of the medium is still being built.

• Classroom dialogue in several languages: the child may think in one language and answer in another, so an idea can enter the discussion before its wording is standardised.

Result — Language excludes when instruction ignores students’ home languages and linguistic backgrounds; it includes when the home language is treated as a resource that carries the child into the school language.