Multilingual Education and India

Dear multilingual Education friends, Next week on Monday the 27th there will be a webinar on " Using an Additional Language as the Medium of Instruction: Transition in Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education " The Webinar will be led by Dr Agatha van Ginkel who I happen to know as we both speak the same mother tongue: Dutch! Dr van Ginkel has a wide experience on as well the grassroot level as in national and international level projects. Highly recommended! Note in the below announcement that you need to sign up as the space is limited.

Dear multilingual Education friends, Every year the ASER report provides a great source of data with regards to realities of primary education in rural India. The ASER press release states: Every year, ASER finds out whether children in rural India go to school, whether they can read simple text and whether they can do basic arithmetic. Nationally, the proportion of all children in Std. V who can read a Std. II level text remains virtually the same since 2012, at 47%. This proportion decreased each year from 2009 to 2012, dropping  from 52.8% in 2009 to 46.9% in 2012. Among Std. V children enrolled in government schools, the percentage of children able to read Std. II level text decreased from 50.3% (2009) to 43.8% (2011) to 41.1% (2013). Over the last three years, there has been a steady increase in the provision of libraries in schools that have been visited. The All

Dear MLE friends, The project managers of the Toto mother tongue based multilingual education project in West Bengal have become very creative in their fund raising. Instead of looking for big donors, they are collecting funds via crowd-sourcing. Look at their promotional website and video to learn how they do that. Besides that, the approach the project is taking is also of interest. Lissa Davies writes "... We have been using Karla's heritage playschool book as our template curriculum. We have since, developed our own curriculum and TLMs, which we are thinking of putting  into a publishable document, given that there must be other communities out there, especially in India, whereby they face the same problems we have faced. " 

Dear multilingual education friends, In March 2013 LEAD Asia held workshop on the topic of ' Identity-Based Community Development ', bringing together 60 community development practitioners from 12 different countries. One of the outputs of this event was the production of a practitioners guide titled Signposts to Identity-Based Community Development . The guide provides a useful resource for anyone involved in community development work, particularly among linguistic minorities. It is adding to the growing literature around the importance of communities identity, language and culture in the development process. A brief introduction to the guide is included below.

Dear multilingual education friends, The United Nations is encouraging college and university students to write an essay in one of its six official languages on the role of multilingualism in a globalized world. To qualify, the student’s native language has to be different from the one in which he or she writes, and different from the principal one at the school. The contest is called " Many languages, one world ’.