MILES : An Introduction

 Evaluation in Language
 Ramification of demands
 Centralised mechanism
 Comprehensive database
 Retrieval facility

India is blessed with one of the largest network^* of languages in the world. As of now, these languages are used by more than 1000 million people for their day to day communication; many of them are learnt by about 50 million students as a subject of studyat various levels of education. They are also adopted as a medium of instruction in about a million Institutions across 29 states and 6 UTs of the country. Hence, knowledge of these languages has become increasingly significant for various purposes, including the examinations meant for admission, certification and employment. In view of this enormity - both in terms of number of languages as well as users, it becomes imperative that the teaching & learning of Indian languages have acquired new dimensions. As a result, evaluation in language education too has acquired a lot of importance with demands of different types pouring in (at the CT&E of the institute) from different organizations of the country and abroad.

As a result, the ramification of the issues encountered by this centre also becomes exorbitant. It involves a variety of languages (classical & modern); range of content inputs (informatory & extra-polatory); linguistic usergroups (cognates & non-cognates); levels of educational progression (primary to research), and the contexts of learning (native / second / foreign language). Some of these demands are meant only for language; some of them are for only literature; and many of them are meant for both. There are also demands for mechanism to maintain inter and intra language comparability, and parity in academic quality across the courses of study. The other demands include the technology transfer, training mechanism, consultancy needs, orientation programmesand so on, in addition to the preparation of materials for instruction and also for evaluation to meet a variety of inhouse programmes.

As such, the issues are multidimensional in nature that have spread across different languages, different levels of education, different areas of contents, requiring different methods, to fulfill different purposes within a timeframe specified by the organisations under different administrative controls. In order to meet all such academic complexities under a series of administrative constraints, an exclusive section to under take R & D at the Institute was felt necessary, a couple of decades back. Accordingly, an integrated R&D in evaluation was initiated with reference to language, literature, & person growth, in the context of teaching, learning and evaluation. This has resulted in the evolution of centralised mechanism called Multipurpose Indian Language Evaluation System (MILES). It consists of two major components viz., a comprehensive database and a user friendly retrieval facility.

The comprehensive database being created in each major Indian language, consists of a variety of item resources covering all the dimensions associated with the components of language, literature, and person-growth as reflected in the respective General Frame of Reference (GFR). Being built up on inter-disciplinary concepts (linguistics, education, psychology, mathematics, statistics, and computer engineering, etc.), every item incorporated here has utilised the item frameand technique that are considered as effectively addressing the problems concerning scholastic and non-scholastic areas. Based on the factors being emphasised, all the associated information have been categorised under contents, methods, and purposes of evaluation and are stored in an electronic database with the details entered in the item file card format along with computer number codes assigned to each one of the components of language and literature. The question items included have been provided with quality indices.

The retrieval facility developed, is being extended to all the major Indian languages. On completion of this massive work, it will help to have instant construction of a variety of syllabi as well as instruments of evaluation in equivalent forms, with sampling error-free content coverage. The creation of MILES will therefore be useful to fulfill the evaluation requirements concerning any of the Indian language, for any purpose, any level of education, and also for any length of time duration; it may also provide the details of information pertaining to various teachable and testable units of language & literature (such as major, minor, and sub components) thereby paving a way for getting the existing syllabi restructured ; further, it will also provide an access to get the background details of various scholars who could be involved in the formulation and implementation of a variety of evaluation programmes. It will be an user-friendly mechanism for retrieving information either on knowing the objects of education, or on the particulars of item writer, or the aspects of language / literature / person growth, or the levels of education, or the indices of item quality or a combination of all.

*1652 MTs (1 million & above), 15 languages of VIII schedule of the constitution of India are spoken 87% of the population; as per 100th amendment of the constitution, the number of languages included in the VIII schedule is 22. They are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu