Multilingual Education and India

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

Dear MLE friends, The latest issue of the UNESCO MLE Newsletter has an impressive list of news items, resources, events, etc. I was e.g. not yet aware of a conference close by: ·  9th International Language and Development Conference "Language and Social Cohesion." , Sri Lanka; 17 - 19 Oct. 2011 . Or how about an article on Native language skills key to Inuit academic success ?

Dear MLE Friends, In the Philippines MLE is implemented large scale by the government. Today I saw a  article on " Folk knowledge and  MLE" in a national newspaper at which prof. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco,   shares his experience with the programme. A few quotes: "The remarkable thing about these training events was the overwhelming enthusiasm and dedication of the teachers, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, in producing primers, alphabet books, big books, small books and lesson exemplars in their own languages. Never before in our education history have I seen production of educational materials in native languages attempted in such a scale." "... there is much to learn about our past and our heritage from our country’s communities. In promoting such knowledge in formal education, we also uphold their right to exist, their right to reproduce their language, and their right to pract...