Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, A positive development at our northern neighbour Nepal: The establishment of a Multilingual Education (MLE) Resource Centre in Nepal has begun with the support of UNESCO. The Unesco website states here : "The MLE documentation centre will: provide necessary academic and research support to optimize multi-pronged engagement in providing quality MLE in Nepal; guidance for planning and implementation of MLE programmes; coordination between different MLE activities providing documentation and information resources; networking of various MLE interest groups, institutions and individuals; and establishing linkages to optimize effective utilization of expertise and materials for MLE programmes." I found it also encouraging to read the below: "It is expected that with the support of the MoE, the MLE resourc

Dear MLE friends, The third issue of the UNESCO Multilingual Education Newsletter is out. You can find it at: http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=12786 In the issues are MLE related news items and articles from all over the world. In the resource section I found e.g. the following publication: ·  Closer to home: how to help schools in low- and middle-income countries respond to children's language needs by Helen Pinnock, Pamela Mackenzie, Elizabeth Pearce and Catherine Young In the events calender I  e.g. saw  ·  2nd Philippine Conference-Workshop on Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education EFA and MTBMLE 2015 and Beyond , Philippines; 16 - 18 February 2012

Dear MLE friends, In the press we have read about the progress on the Ganesh Devy's People's Linguistic Survey of India. In a recent article in the GlobalPost titled " India: fight to preserve dying languages " the potential  educational impact of that survey was also mentioned: "Though various studies have shown that children learn better when taught basic concepts in their mother tongue before attempting to master a second language, India prioritizes just 22 out of the 900-odd languages that Devy seeks to catalogue, and the state's promised free and compulsory education is most often available in fewer still. “In the Constitution of India, there is a special schedule of languages, which alone receive official support,” said Devy. “When the schedule was created after independence, it had 14 languages. Now it has 22. All the funds for