Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Below is a short article by Dr Michael Tan of the University of the Philippines about the Philippino government's Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) programme. It was published in a newspaper called the Inquirer. As mentioned before the Philippines government has decided to implement MultiLingual Education (MLE) in their primary schools. It will be interesting for us in India to follow that as it is an Asian country with many minority languages. A quote: “To implement the new policy, DepEd will support very basic work like developing orthographies (spelling system) for local languages to use for educational materials. Community involvement will be vital for this new program to succeed. Expect to see, in the years ahead, a renewed pride in local languages because of this new policy, even as the Filipino becomes more adept at acquiring proficiency in a second, a third, even a fourth language.”