Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Yesterday I visited the new MLE resource centre hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), sponsored by Unicef. They now have their own office on the campus and also have a nice website: http://www.nmrc-jnu.org/ The website already contains several good MLE related articles, has book references, pictures and other things. There is also a way to register yourself to subscribe to a newsletter: Worth doing!

Dear MLE friends, Kenya is not next door, but given the very interesting list of topics, I thought I should still share this conference announcement with you.

Dear MLE friends, Below is a short article by Dr Michael Tan of the University of the Philippines about the Philippino government's Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) programme. It was published in a newspaper called the Inquirer. As mentioned before the Philippines government has decided to implement MultiLingual Education (MLE) in their primary schools. It will be interesting for us in India to follow that as it is an Asian country with many minority languages. A quote: “To implement the new policy, DepEd will support very basic work like developing orthographies (spelling system) for local languages to use for educational materials. Community involvement will be vital for this new program to succeed. Expect to see, in the years ahead, a renewed pride in local languages because of this new policy, even as the Filipino becomes more adept at acquiring proficiency in a second, a third, even a fourth language.”

Dear MLE friends, Most of the articles, research papers and newspaper clippings in this list are building a case to support MLE. However, there are also other voices. Some claiming that the tribal people themselves do not want it. Attached is an article making that claim. This brings out an important question: it seems that at this point the academic and NGO world is quite convinced that a multilingual approach will be best for the children on the long run, but have we been able to interact sufficient with the tribal communities themselves on this? Have we been able to find leaders who really represent the voice of the people themselves?

" Dear MLE friends, SEAMEO is the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization . It recently  published a collection of language policies and case studies on mother tongue as bridge language of instruction from the eleven countries in Southeast Asia .  The publication, entitled " Mother tongue as bridge language of instruction: policies and experiences in Southeast Asia " was produced and published in collaboration with the SEAMEO Member Countries. It is stated that the publication is regarded as the most valuable output from the SEAMEO-World Bank Project on Mother Tongue and can be a rich advocacy tool.