Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE Friends, As you know the Right to Education  act (RTE) does support education in mother tongue, but has stated it quite weakly by adding the wiggle line "as far as possible". The All India Forum for Right to Education (AIF-RTE)  therefore organised a National Workshop "Language and Education" earlier this year. Recently they published a "National Call" with a strong urge to strengthen the appeal for using the mother tongue; We express our deep concern that 'The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009' (henceforth referred to as the RTE Act) has made a mockery of the crucial role of the mother tongue at the formative pre-primary (nursery, KG) and elementary (Class I-VIII) stages by stating that education in the child's mother tongue will be provided only if it is 'practicable' [Section 29 (2) (f)]. By doing this, the RTE Act

Dear MLE friends, It seems to be conference season! This time it is our northern neighbour China hosting a conference on “ Zero Barrier Bilingual Education ” . It will be their first International Conference on MLE. The dates: 25-28 October 2011 and the venue: Jinghong City, Xishuangbana Prefecture, Yunnan, China .The hosts for the conference comprise of the Yunnan Provincial Ministry of Education, Yunnan Ethnic Affairs Commission and SIL East Asia. Over the two-day conference, papers will be presented and discussion groups organized to discuss current world trends in bilingual education and pedagogy, results of practical experiments, development of approaches to bilingual instruction and other related academic issues, in order to better serve minority groups.

Dear MLE friends, The MLE programme in Andra Pradesh is one of the biggest in the world. It is impacting 68000 children in over 2000 schools in 8 tribal languages. A few year s ago an impact study was done for the first two grades. That report many of us had never seen, but is worth noting. It is called: A study on the comfortability and impact of class ii tribal language primers and classes I & II Mathematics Textbooks . The study was done by Prof Dr Shashidhar Rao of the Education Department of Institute of Advanced Study in Education for SSA. It gives a thorough documentation for each la nguage community on the opinion of teachers, parents etc. and also the achievements of the children. A few conclusion: 11. Parents expressed happiness over this and studied that the intervention

Dear MLE friends, Good news: an MLE conference in India! The National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC) of JNU will hold an International Consultative Meet on MLE in collaboration with UNICEF, UNESCO, CIIL and other organisations, from 19th - 21st September 2011, in CIIL (Mysore). The seven page concept note on "MOTHER TONGUE BASED MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION: FRAMEWORK, STRATEGIES AND IMPLEMENTATION" is worth reading. It gives an overview of what is going on in India, also paints the picture of the activities in the neighbouring countries and notes the trends.

Dear MLE Friends, The Centre for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute has just published " A Global Compact on Learning: taking action on education in developing countries ." It outlines six strategies, one of which is "Provide Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in the Lower Primary Grades". A couple of quotes: "Although implementing a mother-tongue-based multilingual policy requires additional resources for start-up, the costs per primary school completer may be much lower due to increased learning, reduced repetition and dropout rates, and increased completion rates. For example, in the case of a bilingual program in Mali, costs per primary school completer were reduced by 27 percent and resulted in higher academic achievement." "Two main actions need to be taken to achieve Strategy 2B: • Develop a comprehensive language p

Dear MLE friends, South Africa is doing an experiment where children from the minority group get the classroom interactions translated via an interpreter. " Six months into the project (...) education officials, teachers and interpreters are enthusiastic about the results. " "The project, run by the language directorate of North-West University's (NWU) institutional office, entails the interpretation of lessons from English to Setswana in grade one, and Afrikaans lessons are interpreted to English from grades two to seven. In this way, three languages are involved in the project " Read more at: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-07-20-found-in-translation/    

Dear MLE Friends, The upcoming international language development conference on Language and Social Cohesion is hosted by Sri Lanka. It has a special track on Education. The sub-themes under Education are: Social integration through language curricula and teaching materials Education, language and social inequality Bi lingual and multilingual teaching including practical approaches Language as a subject in the curriculum vs. language as the medium of instruction Innovation in language teaching and teacher training