Figure 1: Language skills and concept development chart Stage 1 L1 Build small children's oral fluency, competence and confidence in L1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 5 Use L1 as the medium of instruction Use L1 as the medium of instruction Use L1 as the medium of instruction Continue to build oral L1 Continue to build oral and written L1 Continue to build oral and Continue to written fluency build oral and in L1 written L1 & L2 for fluency, and learning new concepts Continue to build oral L2 Introduce reading and writing in L1 L2 Stage 4 Introduce Oral L2 Introduce reading and writing in L2 L3 Introduce oral L3 Stage 6 Stage 7 Continue to build fluency & confidence in using L1, L2 and L3 for Use all everyday languages for communication learning & for learning new concepts Introduce reading and writing in L3 6. Challenges and solutions: the Indian context India’s linguistic diversity presents some complex challenges, but in the last few years some State Education Departments, under Sarva Shiksha Abhihan (SSA), are beginning to address some of the issues with the practical implementation of possible solutions. 6.1 Linguistic diversity The Census of India (1961) recorded 1652 mother tongues with a much larger number of dialects which have been classified into 300 to 400 major languages belonging to five language families. But there are only 22 official languages (Constitution of India, VIIIth schedule, after the 100th constitutional amendment, December 2003), along with English (the associate official language). Nearly 80 per cent of Indian languages are endangered; most of them tribal. 6.2 Scripts There are 25 scripts used for writing Indian languages; 11 major scripts are used to write the main scheduled languages; 13 minor scripts are used for writing some minor and tribal languages; and Roman script has been adopted by some languages in recent years. Some tribal languages, such as Santali, have developed their own writing system, but most of the tribal languages do not have a script. Where an orthography has been developed, the script of either the dominant regional language or another major language is used.