Multilingual Education and India

Dear multilingual education friends, Earlier this months the People's Linguistic Survey of India   (PLSI) conference took place. 900 delegates from all over the world gathered in Baroda to celebrate the progress on survey. A quote from the Lit-Ityadi report Anyone familiar with George Grierson's historic work, the Linguistic Survey of India , compiled nearly 100 years ago, will immediately note the similarities. What is different however, about the PLSI, is the notion of networking, now made by possible by modern methods of communication, that enables adivasi people from Orissa to dance shoulder to shoulder with Bhili tribesmen from Gujarat. This sense of solidarity was felt, not only between the Indian delegates, but also internationally as we heard from indigenous people from Papua New Guinea and various parts of Africa. A quote from the Times of India report This is

Dear MLE friends, It is not often that top politicians write elaborately about issues related to multilingualism. Lee Kuan Yew the former prime minister of Singapore published recently " My lifelong challenge: Singapore's bilingual journey ". He has been strong advocate of maintaining Chinese and other mother tongues within the schools in Singapore while still making English the mainstream language. Some quotes from a Asia One newspaper review: My Lifelong Challenge is the story of Mr Lee Kuan Yew's 50-year struggle to transform Singapore from a polyglot former British colony into a united nation where everyone, while knowing English, knows at least one other language, his own mother tongue. The founding prime minister of Singapore tells why he did away with vernacular schools in spite of violent political resistance, why he closed Nanyang University, why he la

Dear multilingual education friends, The MLE India webblog is celebrating its first birthday! A good excuse for giving it a easier URL www.mle-india.net and a facelift: have look at the new lay-out. The site i s more than just a list of the postings on the MLE mailing list. It also has the following pages: MLE Related Projects : An overview of multilingual education related project

Dear MLE friends, A while ago I travelled with a donor to review an MLE related project in North East India. Her concern was that our efforts to develop the local languages and use them in the schools would encourage the ethnic conflicts. Today I saw an IBN article titled " Language, the basis of unity and conflict " by Prof H S Shivaprakash on this very issue.  A few quotes: Language, as one of the most pre-eminent expressions of human civilisation, has always been the source of unity and conflict in human history. There have been times when the unity of diverse peoples was imposed by existing forms of tyranny as in the case of Roman Civilisation. Equally numerous are the cases when language question figured prominently as a means of self-assertion as exemplified by the emergence of Bangladeshi and Ukrainian nationalism in the recent past. India never had the counterp

Dear MLE friends, Once again the JNU National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC) has brought out a high quality newsletter . The main topic is the outcome of a longitudinal research spanning over the last three years done in Orissa and AP: "DOES MLE WORK IN ANDHRA PRADESH & ODISHA? A LONGITUDINAL STUDY" Some quotes: "To sum up, the findings across the two states and five time frames, it can be pointed out that in case of both Andhra Pradesh and Odisha,the MLE children had better overall performance in all the objective measures of achievement taken together; MANOVA analyses for the state specific data over the five time-frames showed clearly that the performance of the MLE children was significantly better than that of their non-MLE counterparts when all the variables are taken together." (P13) "All the MLE teachers interviewed (except one) expressed th