Multilingual Education and India

A Book in Every Hand Last month Pratham Books, a UNICEF founded NGO, released more than 800 books in 27 languages on the StoryWeaver India website. Anyone can add, translate or read books there.   The Indian Express reports in the article A book in every hand: Pratham Books wants to make reading fun and accessible for children that a week after releasing the website  https://storyweaver.org.in/ there were 800+ books and 20,000 reads. Currently the teller is on nearly 35000 reads and the site has over 900 stories in 27 languages. Till now the languages listed are mainly state or foreign languages, but it is likely possible to translate to or write in any langauge. Worth trying! There are some differences and similarities with the software BLOOM that recently won the Enabling Writers competition (see Blog Post from last June ). Bloom can be used off line and is focussed on creating books for paper publishing while Story Weaver is particularly good at web publication. They b

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,