Multilingual Education and India

Last Month the government of Odisha made a significant move in the expansion of the multilingual education program. The Times of India reports: "In a bid to extend the mother-tongue based Multilingual Education Programme (MLE), the state government has decided to use mother tongues as medium of instruction for the first five years in primary schools. In these classes, Odia will be taught as the second language from Class II and English will be introduced as a language subject from Class III."   Usha Padhee, secretary, school and mass education department, Government of Odisha affirms the long-term benefits of multilingual education. It seems that the Odisha government is the first one to take the education in the Mothertongue really serious. Mr Usha Padhee, secretary, school and mass education department states: "Continuing primary education for the first five years of school in the mother tongue will have several long-term benefits like sustained a

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  equally  be  able  to  maintain equal  competencies  in  many  languages  like

Dear multilingual education friends, Usually newspaper articles report on something new starting. This time Republic in Nepal reports on a failing project. The article Multilingual education fails to attract students in Jhapa points out that due to book supply challenges and resistance from the parents, several MLE classes have stopped.  It would be interesting to investigate further what is going on there. If you know any background on this, please put your comments on the MLE-India blog just below this entry. A few quotes: In Jhapa district, more than three dozen schools had been conducting classes in around half a dozen local languages, including Rajbanshi, Limbu, and Santhal. However, many of these schools could not implement the mother-tongue based education after stakeholders criticized the use of local languages as the medium of instruction. It seems one of the problems was with the teachers:

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

Dear Multilingual education friends, Some of the tribal groups in need for education in their mother tongue do not yet have a proper orthography. A new books has come out that topic:   Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages Linguistics and Orthography   ·          Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (Editors). 2014. Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages . SIL International. 276 pgs ·           It is available in India via flipkart and Amazon . The table of content is given below.