Multilingual Education and India

What could be more fun than reading a book authored by someone you know and about a topic you know about? The latest book by Dr. Mahendra Mishra focuses on Multilingual Education (MLE) in Tribal schools in India. I particularly liked the chapter on implementation as I remember so well how Dr. Mishra worked with our SIL colleagues Steve and Vicky Simpson, developing "Community Calendars" and "Theme Webs". It was around 2007 that I visited the project and saw the theme webs on the walls and the tribal teachers enthusiastically developing “big books”. That process is described on page 100 of the book which puts it literally and figuratively at the centre: This book is not just about the language issue in education but particularly shows a passion for the culture and folklore in which the children live and make that part of the teaching, books, and activities. In the concluding paragraph of that chapter Mishra writes "The community took a keen interest in sharing ...

Dear MultiLingual Education Friends, The report on the  National Seminar on Language Education  has come out . The seminar was  organized  jointly by the SCERT and IFIG  at 21-23  February,  2014  at Raipur  Chhattisgarh with Dr Mahendra Mishra as convenor. The three main issues addressed at this seminar are stated as follows:        How multilinguality is a reality and how our schools are unable to ensure the linguistic rights of the children. How language of the text book is teacher-centric and unable to represent the meaning of the texts in a language that is not understood by the children. How education can  be imparted  –  as far as practicable to those children who are linguistic minority,  and  eq...

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, Against the backdrop of the new Early Childhood Care and Education policies Prof Shivali Tukdeo recently wrote an article in the Indian Express titled The Word and the World . A few quotes: The inclusion of home or local languages in preschool is a step in the right direction, for educational as well as social reasons. Evidence-based studies on early childhood and research in educational psychology and cognition suggest that exposure to multiple languages can facilitate early development. Given the interactive nature of early learning, home languages and local vernaculars would be excellent resources to introduce the child to the rhymes, rhythms and stories of a world that she inhabits. With the inclusion of mother tongues and local vernaculars in preschools, many neighbourhoods and localities, ...

Dear multilingual education friends, Are you interested in how to integrate different languages in a curriculum? Towards an Integrated Language Curriculum in Early Childhood and Primary Education (3-12 years) is a research report by Jim Cummins et al. in the context of Ireland. Four questions were researched: How can the idea of an integrated language curriculum be defined? What are the key principles of language learning and development which should underpin a language curriculum for children aged 3 to 12 years? Where is the evidence for it in policy and practice? What are the expected outcomes by 8 years of age for children’s learning and development in t...

Dear multilingual education friends, The value of a working orthography is often overlooked while pursuing MLE. We often focus on the educational factors and tend to overlook the linguistics. Butch Hernandez wrote an article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Spell well, read well, write well in which he writes that teacher want to develop learning material, but often struggle: The problem lies in orthography, or more specifically, the absence of one for the desired mother tongue. Orthography is actually the set of spelling and writing rules that govern a particular language. In her piece “How Spelling Supports Reading,” Louisa Moats, a literacy research and professional development expert, explains that “research has shown that learning to spell and learning to read rely on much of the same underlying knowledge—such as the relationships between letters and sounds—and, not surprisingly, ...