Multilingual Education and India

Dear multilingual education friends, In Assam some good pilots are going on and the press has found them. Last week the attached article appeared in a newspaper in Assam. Interestingly the article highlights that from the boy they feature his English has become better. It seems that is an important point for advocacy because it is English that the society values most. A quote: "Kisun, however, is an exception. He is the only one in the family who attends an Adivasiya school and can read and write English" "'Earlier when I was studying in the LP school in the village, I could not understand English or follow any of my lessons. However, after coming to Adivasiya school, I can read and write English to some extent. I have also learned my own language better now.'" The article then continues to explain more about the school, the pilot project and the brother MLE efforts in the country an

Dear Multilingual Education friends, A group of writers in Karnataka submitted a petition to the supreme court in favour of mother tongue medium education supporting the state government's rule on this regard Are you interested in this in more detail, control click on the following: Times of India: Writers pitch for mother tongue A quote from the petition: " Children can learn better in their mother tongue and it's the appropriate medium. Even Mahatma Gandhi had echoed the same view. Nobody has opposed English. English can be taught as one of the subjects at primary level. ”

Dear multilingual education friends, The first End of Decade Note on Education for All 2012 is on Early Childhood Care and Education . It is published by UNICEF and UNESCO Asia Pacific.“The EDN present a review of regional and national progress toward the six EFA goals, take stock of the progress, persisting issues and remaining challenges in achieving the goals, and highlight examples of innovative policy reforms and strategies, particularly those aimed at reducing disparities in access to and quality of education.” Have a look at Section 4.3 on MLE’s value for addressing language inequities, “ Addressing Language Inequities in Ethnolinguistic and Indigenous Communities: The Value of Multilingual

Dear  Multilingual Education friends, Is three years of mother tongue medium education long enough? There is a report ( “ The Kom Experimental Mother Tongue Education Pilot Project. Report for 2012 ,” by Stephen L. Walter and Kain Godfrey Chuo) on the Kom Pilot project in Cameron where children from 12 different schools were educated in their mother tongue, Kom, for three years and joined the main stream school grade 4 onwards. The research compares these students with their comparison group with English medium education while they are grade 3, 4, and 5. Here I quote some of their main findings and suggestions. The three year period of the intervention is n

Dear Multilingual Education Friends, Here is an video on mother tongue based MLE in Timor Leste by ABC Australia. Note that there IS opposition and misunderstanding to the program but the program is still going on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft6Y5bSARyU&feature=plcp  

Dear Multilingual Education friends, A recent study from Europe is showing that Children from low income families benefit from being bilingual. NALDIC (National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum) based in England highlights an interesting study on this topic in their website ( http://www.naldic.org.uk/eal-advocacy/eal-news-summary/200912?dm_i=11M1,Z16E,7M1CX5,2XSTQ,1  ). Quote: “ This is the first study to show that, although they may face linguistic challenges, minority bilingual children from low-income families demonstrate important strengths in other cognitive domains..... Our study suggests that intervention programs that are based on second

Dear multilingual Education friends, “ Shrimp ’ s back gets broken when whales fight. ” This is an idiom from Korean, meaning when there is fighting between powerful men, weak people could be a scapegoat of the fighting unless they are very careful. This metaphor seems to fit well in this big fighting between English and Hindi and many other local languages which could be scapegoats of this fighting. The English whale seems to be winning the game as there are scare materials available in Hindi for tertiary level education in Delhi and even many government schools in Karnataka will use English as a medium to compete with English medium private schools. Sumanyu Satpathy, linguist at the University of Delhi, wrote an article on it in the Hindu. A few quotes: “The domination of English and Hindi is turning Indian education and culture into a depre