Multilingual Education and India

Dear MultiLingual Education Friends, The report on the  National Seminar on Language Education  has come out . The seminar was  organized  jointly by the SCERT and IFIG  at 21-23  February,  2014  at Raipur  Chhattisgarh with Dr Mahendra Mishra as convenor. The three main issues addressed at this seminar are stated as follows:        How multilinguality is a reality and how our schools are unable to ensure the linguistic rights of the children. How language of the text book is teacher-centric and unable to represent the meaning of the texts in a language that is not understood by the children. How education can  be imparted  –  as far as practicable to those children who are linguistic minority,  and  eq...

Dear multilingual education friends, Usually newspaper articles report on something new starting. This time Republic in Nepal reports on a failing project. The article Multilingual education fails to attract students in Jhapa points out that due to book supply challenges and resistance from the parents, several MLE classes have stopped.  It would be interesting to investigate further what is going on there. If you know any background on this, please put your comments on the MLE-India blog just below this entry. A few quotes: In Jhapa district, more than three dozen schools had been conducting classes in around half a dozen local languages, including Rajbanshi, Limbu, and Santhal. However, many of these schools could not implement the mother-tongue based education after stakeholders criticized the use of local languages as the medium of instruction. It seems one of the problems was with the teache...

Dear multilingual education friends, There seem to be some significant moves in the language policies of our northern neighbour Pakistan. The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information, Broadcasting and National Heritage earlier this months " declared major mother tongues as national languages and pledged not to allow 1linguiside'  of rich mother tongues " A few quotes from the article  NA panel for declaring mother tongues as national languages : This one was new to me: Punjabi scholar Saeed Farani said many verses in the Holy Quran have emphasised the importance of mother tongue and all Sufi poetry was in local languages. With regards to MLE: They urged the federal and provincial governments to take concrete steps for imparting education in mother tongues, as several regional languages were rapidly disappearing. On regional versus national: Th...

Dear Multilingual education friends, Some of the tribal groups in need for education in their mother tongue do not yet have a proper orthography. A new books has come out that topic:   Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages Linguistics and Orthography   ·          Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (Editors). 2014. Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages . SIL International. 276 pgs ·           It is available in India via flipkart and Amazon . The table of content is given below.

Congrats, Multilingual Education Friends, today is International Mother Language day! A nice description on West-Info-eu is given as follows: Today 21 st February , the International Mother Language Day is celebrated. Proclaimed the first time in 1999 by UNESCO , it is an important initiative to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multiculturalism. The date represents the day in 1952 when students demonstrating for recognition of their language, Bangla , as one of the two national languages of the then Pakistan , were shot and killed by police in Dhaka , the capital of what is now Bangladesh. However, due to globalization processes, languages are increasingly under threat  to the point that more than 50% of the 7,000 ...