Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Good books that are affordable are rare. Fortunately the authors/editors of the latest book on MLE, K. Heugh & T. Skutnabb-Kangas, choose India as the place to publish. Give the impressive list of authors, Dr Ajit Mohanty being one of them, content wise it will be good too.  More details below.

Dear MLE friends, Subtitling a television programme resulting in significant  increase of literacy rates, sounds too nice to be true, but it seems to be happening: "India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers." Even if the claim would be a bit optimistic, the article is worth reading. Combining mass entertainment with learning is very attractive. Of course this works in the first place for state languages, but also in some of the bigger unrecognised languages videos are produced and are very popular (Kuma...

Dear MLE friends, Long term impact is what really matters. However longitudinal  research is rare. The  Young Lives Project   is a long-term international research project"investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty". India has been chosen as one of their focus countries. The question is asked: "What does the future hold for the 2000 Young Lives index children born in the state of Andhra Pradesh?". As mother tongue is part of the data documented, this research is also relevant to language and education issues. Some findings of the 2008 second round of survey in India http://www.younglives.org.uk/countries/india/index_html : "We  found  that  household  and  community characteristics  greatly  influence  children’s  outcomes, particularly ethnicity, the rural-urban divide (which affects access to services among other things) and parents’  leve...

- Dear MLE friends, Attached is more info about the registration for the the November Bangkok Conference on the millennium goals in relation to language and education. Some explanation is below.

Dear MLE friends, Ten more scripts in India! All designed by Professor Prasanna Sree, senior professor, Department of English, Andhra University. See newspaper item copied below or click this link: http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/24/stories/2010072456772000.htm I am not sure it will be of real help and meeting a need, but it is for sure an interesting initiative. Unlike as in e.g. Europe in India script and language are strongly related. Many do not perceive their language as a proper "language" if it does not have a distinct script. However from a pedagogical viewpoint a separate script is a headage as for the learning children.  The transition from the local language to the language of wider communication will be hampered.