Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Yesterday a nice article appeared in the Express Newspaper about the Orissa MLE programme. You can find it at http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Orissa+shows+the+way+in+tribal+pocketse&artid=lE6jZWpifQc%3d&SectionID=mvKkT3vj5ZA%3d&MainSectionID=fyV9T2jIa4A%3d&SectionName=nUFeEOBkuKw%3d&SEO%3b (text copied below). A nice encouragement to Dr Mahendra Mishra and his team!

Dear MLE friends, In an article entitled "Stark Lessons in Mother Tongue," the on-line Guardian Weekly draws attention to a joint report published in April 2009 which discusses the difficulties children face when their education is conducted in an unfamiliar language. The Guardian Weekly states: International charities are warning that global efforts to raise education outcomes are being held back by the widespread denial of schooling in children's first languages. Developing countries are unlikely to meet UN targets for improving education because of the widespread marginalization of students' first languages, which results in teaching being delivered in languages that children struggle to understand or to use effectively. This is the stark warning

Dear MLE friends, There is an increased interest in early childhood and MLE. Unesco just published a report about is. Here are the details:   ENHANCING LEARNING OF CHILDREN FROM DIVERSE LANGUAGE BACKGROUNDS: MOTHER TONGUE-BASED BILINGUAL OR MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE EARLY YEARS. U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Jessica Ball. 2010. The literature review discusses mother tongue-based bilingual or multilingual education for children starting in early childhood. The report informs policy-makers of existing research and practices in mother-tongue instruction in early childhood and early primary school

Dear MLE friends, Some of us are always looking for good training material in areas like multi lingualism, reading, writing, language learning, etc. The Training for Early Literacy Learning (TELL) department of the South African National Centre for Learning and Literacy is offering all their materials for free on the internet.  Check it out on http://www.tell.praesa.org/ Some of the details are copied below.

Dear MLE friends, The Unesco EFA Monitoring report which was released last week has lots of references to language issues. One quote: "People who do not speak a country's official language often face marginalization in education and beyond. Around 221 million children speak a different language at home from the language of instruction in school. Put simply, one of the reasons that many linguistic and ethnic minority children perform poorly in school is that they are taught in a language they struggle to understand. Addressing language-related disadvantage confronts governments and households with major challenges. Research demonstrates that children in the