Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, The latest issue of the UNESCO MLE Newsletter has an impressive list of news items, resources, events, etc. I was e.g. not yet aware of a conference close by: ·  9th International Language and Development Conference "Language and Social Cohesion." , Sri Lanka; 17 - 19 Oct. 2011 . Or how about an article on Native language skills key to Inuit academic success ?

Dear MLE Friends, In the Philippines MLE is implemented large scale by the government. Today I saw a  article on " Folk knowledge and  MLE" in a national newspaper at which prof. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco,   shares his experience with the programme. A few quotes: "The remarkable thing about these training events was the overwhelming enthusiasm and dedication of the teachers, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, in producing primers, alphabet books, big books, small books and lesson exemplars in their own languages. Never before in our education history have I seen production of educational materials in native languages attempted in such a scale." "... there is much to learn about our past and our heritage from our country’s communities. In promoting such knowledge in formal education, we also uphold their right to exist, their right to reproduce their language, and their right to pract

Dear MLE friends, A useful way to promote a local language are dictionaries. Nowadays they do not need to be distributed in printed formats but can be web based and be printed on demand. A new free tool has come out to enable language communities to start building up a dictionary. This can be very helpful for teachers to help learn the local language. The tool is free and is called "Webonary". The website states: Webonary gives language groups the ability to put their bilingual or multilingual dictionaries on the web with a minimum of technical help. Each dictionary is built around a search bar, which looks for a word throughout the dictionary, and returns the most relevant results to the top of the list.

Dear MLE Friends, The National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC) just published an excellent overview of MLE related resources in India. It gives a brief description for each items and a snapshot picture. There is also a list with names of experts. Worth looking at! Link: http://www.nmrc-jnu.org/nmrc_img/Resources%20for%20Multilingual%20Education%20in%20India.pdf . The table of content is copied below.

Dear MLE friends, The British Council has recently published a collection of papers examining the relationship between language and development.  The book, 'Dreams and Realities : Developing Countries and the English Language', can be downloaded at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/transform/books/dreams-realities-developing-countries-english-language . There is also a paper on India in this collection titled: 4. Language policy in education and the role of English in India: From library language to language of empowerment . It has lots of interesting information on the use of the majority languages in the classrooms, but has no references to the issue of minority languages and the projects in mother tongue based multilingual education. Anybody likes to challenge the publishers on that?

Dear MLE friends, Good news from our northern neighbour: the Multilingual Education efforts in Nepal have been noticed and will be evaluated. The Unesco website states: The study will review the government’s commitment towards multilingual education, analyse the current practices and impacts on children’s performance, and evaluate the attitudes of education authorities and parents towards multilingual education.

Dear MLE friends, Several people asked what kind of courses are offered related to MLE. Therefore a page has been added to the MLE-India blog with a list of MLE related courses and events .