Many students throughout the developing world struggle with reading, and some 250 million children are still unable to read a single word after having been in school for up to four years. In this video, Pooja Reddy Nakamura explains the role that language and multilingualism plays in the global learning crisis.

In this commentary, Pooja Reddy Nakamura, an AIR senior researcher explores the question of when to introduce English to children in multilingual contexts. Rather than introducing it at the first opportunity, she suggests grouping classes by local language achievement skill—not just age—and introducing written English only after the local language threshold has been reached.

Most of the world is multilingual—at the national, community, family, and individual levels—and each of these has implications for teaching and learning. This study is one of the first to focus on a theory of change relevant for multilingual learners in the developing world. Pooja Nakamura introduces the report in a brief video.