Abstract

 
 
 The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was developed to assess the narrative abilities of bi- and multilingual children in the various languages that they speak. This paper presents the details of the adaptation of MAIN to three Indian languages, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam. We describe some typological features of these languages and discuss the challenges faced during the process of adaptation. Finally, we give an overview of results for narrative comprehension and production from Kannada-English and Hindi-English bilinguals aged 7 to 9.
 
 
Highlights
The linguistic landscape of India is a complex one given the pluri-lingual and pluri-ethnic nature of the country
This paper describes the adaption of MAIN to Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam
We provide brief descriptions of the three Indian languages, Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam, to which MAIN has been adapted by the authors of this paper
Summary
The linguistic landscape of India is a complex one given the pluri-lingual and pluri-ethnic nature of the country. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers and educators in such a context is assessing the linguistic proficiency of bilingual children in all of the languages that they speak This has been difficult because there have been very few assessment tools that have been developed for bilinguals. These stories have been carefully matched such that they are comparable in terms of the components of Macrostructure, Microstructure and Internal State Terms The instrument assesses both comprehension and production of narratives in all the languages that a child speaks. Since it has been developed for bilinguals it is less biased towards bilingual populations with diverse language and cultural backgrounds than other assessment tools norm referenced for monolingual populations This provides the rationale for adapting MAIN to Indian languages. This paper describes the adaption of MAIN to Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam
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