BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS: Lawrenceville School student Rohan Madhok with children in Punjab, India, for whom he has created tools to help bridge a language gap that was affecting their learning.

By Anne Levin

Rohan Madhok was tutoring young, Spanish-speaking students in Trenton when he realized that their problems with math stemmed not from an inability to grasp concepts, but from the language — English — in which they were presented.

“I noticed the students often struggled not with the math itself, but with the English used to explain it,” he said. “When I explained the same concepts in Spanish, they understood in minutes what had taken them days to grasp in English. A student who knows what adding is but doesn’t know the word ‘add’ looks like a student who can’t add.”

A rising senior at the Lawrenceville School and a resident of Skillman, Madhok witnessed the same sort of roadblocks when he visited the state of Punjab in India. Schoolchildren of migrant families from Hindi-speaking states didn’t understand instructions, which were given in Punjabi.

“Without understanding words such as ‘add’ or ‘subtract’ in Punjabi, many students struggle to complete even basic mathematics exercises because they cannot access the language in which those concepts are taught, even though they understand the concepts,” he said. “A language gap mistaken for a learning problem is just as common and fixable in Trenton as it is in rural Punjab.”

In response, Madhok created a mathematical picture dictionary in Punjabi-Hindi-English for students in grades 1-4, pairing illustrations with classroom and math vocabulary. The dictionary, developed with the nonprofit Sanjhi Sikhiya (Punjab Education Collective), is designed to help students understand the words they encounter in lessons and exercises. “It is paper on purpose, because it is something a student can take home and use without a device or Wi-Fi,” he said.

Separately, Madhok worked with SLAM Labs “to create multilingual mathematical modules that allow instructions to be read aloud,” he said, “giving students a way to strengthen their math skills while they are still learning the classroom language.”

Both of these resources are designed to supplement classroom curriculum rather than replace it. They are currently being piloted through Sanjhi Sikhiya, which serves more than 500 government schools across rural Punjab, Madhok said.

Growing up in a multilingual household, Madhok has spoken Spanish, and other languages, since he was small. “I have always been interested in languages and learning,” he said.
“I’m really interested in how learning happens. I used to tutor unhoused children at HomeFront. I was working with one girl on math, and when I told her about doing long division, she would hear what I was saying in English but wouldn’t understand. I found that if I mixed in some Spanish, she would understand. That made an impression on me.”

The students in India “were incredibly eager to learn,” he said. “They really inspired me. They were happier than anyone I’ve met in the U.S., to be honest. We mixed in some fun questions. At the end, I asked if they had any questions for me. One asked what a dollar looks like. They wanted to hear about snow, about what houses were like in the U.S., about what people looked like. They were incredibly curious.”

Madhok plans on continuing his work with SLAM Labs, for whom he built the translation and audio tools. “I’m now working on a readable tool,” he said. “The goal is to put in any lesson and it gives back a lesson that has been translated to Hindi, English, and Punjabi, with the audio in all three languages built into it.”