Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, It is not often that I write something on this list about a personal experience. But I am so enthusiastic about an MLE programme I visited last week as an external evaluator, that I would like to share about it. Two of my assumptions were challenged. 1. NGOs do adult education; governments do primary education. 2. NGOs and government schools are in competition with each other. Doubly wrong! Here was an NGO successfully strengthening the primary schools in the villages by running MLE classes for children. The NGO, Asha Kiran Society, Lamptaput, Orissa, is running MLE classes in 15 villages. I visited 4 villages, observed classes and talked extensively with the village leaders. Sitting under a tree talking with the villagers, I asked them if the teachers of the MLE programme do actually show up. A whole choir of voices responded with an “Of course”. They explained that the MLE teachers even ask permission

Dear MLE friends, Question-Answer type of leaflets can be very helpful in interacting with Government officials and NGO leaders. Attached is an A4 size simple 20 point brochure to explain MLE in the Philippines context. Most points also apply to India.

Dear MLE friends, Good books that are affordable are rare. Fortunately the authors/editors of the latest book on MLE, K. Heugh & T. Skutnabb-Kangas, choose India as the place to publish. Give the impressive list of authors, Dr Ajit Mohanty being one of them, content wise it will be good too.  More details below.

Dear MLE friends, Subtitling a television programme resulting in significant  increase of literacy rates, sounds too nice to be true, but it seems to be happening: "India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers." Even if the claim would be a bit optimistic, the article is worth reading. Combining mass entertainment with learning is very attractive. Of course this works in the first place for state languages, but also in some of the bigger unrecognised languages videos are produced and are very popular (Kuma

Dear MLE friends, Long term impact is what really matters. However longitudinal  research is rare. The  Young Lives Project   is a long-term international research project"investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty". India has been chosen as one of their focus countries. The question is asked: "What does the future hold for the 2000 Young Lives index children born in the state of Andhra Pradesh?". As mother tongue is part of the data documented, this research is also relevant to language and education issues. Some findings of the 2008 second round of survey in India http://www.younglives.org.uk/countries/india/index_html : "We  found  that  household  and  community characteristics  greatly  influence  children’s  outcomes, particularly ethnicity, the rural-urban divide (which affects access to services among other things) and parents’  levels  of  education.  Household wealth  is  an