Multilingual Education and India

    The new National Curriculum Framework 2023 that came out this week has a strong focus on multilingualism. It wants to ensure that, by age 15, students achieve academic proficiency in at least three languages. Multilingualism is seen as a way to enrich the classroom environment and broaden the thinking of the children. Good! Of course I was particularly interested to see how it deals with the local language. As this new framework came out this week, Upasana and I had a look at what it says about the use of the local language in the classroom. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 (NCF 2023) was released on the 23rd of August 2023. It has been building on the NCF for Foundations Stages that came out last year. (See our blogpost on the NCF for Foundations Stages from November 2022.) According to the address of K. Kasturirangan, the chairman of the National Steering Committee for National Curriculum Frameworks, this document is the first integrated Curriculum Framework fo...

Photo by Jaikishan Patel from Unsplash Last week the Indian government cleared a new National Education Policy (NEP). An NEP sets the framework for education for approximately the next 10 years. It is therefore worth looking at it from a language perspective. The policy gives a push for multilingualism and at first glance it seems that the pedagogical principle of children being taught in their mother tongue is kept up. However a closer look reveals that it is more complex than that.

Last month textbooks in 5 tribal languages and 2 regional languages were released by the government of Jharkhand.   Last month textbooks in 5 tribal languages and 2 regional languages were released by the government of Jharkhand. They have been distributed to around 1,000 schools in 8 districts for initiating the Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Edu...

Dear multilingual education friends, There seem to be some significant moves in the language policies of our northern neighbour Pakistan. The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information, Broadcasting and National Heritage earlier this months " declared major mother tongues as national languages and pledged not to allow 1linguiside'  of rich mother tongues " A few quotes from the article  NA panel for declaring mother tongues as national languages : This one was new to me: Punjabi scholar Saeed Farani said many verses in the Holy Quran have emphasised the importance of mother tongue and all Sufi poetry was in local languages. With regards to MLE: They urged the federal and provincial governments to take concrete steps for imparting education in mother tongues, as several regional languages were rapidly disappearing. On regional versus national: Th...