Multilingual Education and India

                                  Nepal reports positive effects from local language classes Only a few months ago the Nepal press reported negatively about the multilingual education programs. But this time is different . The article Start of native language classes ups enrolment states : "According to the District Education Office (DEO), the use of native language has not only proved effective but also helped increase the quality of education." Fun to read that in this Magar community the program has motivated

    National Geographic Reports on MLE in Assam National Geographic published last month a brief article on the multilingual educations program the NGO  PAJHRA  is doing among the tea planters in Assam.   The article titled " A Talk over Tea: Preserving India's Indigenous Languages" states: " Although Adivasis account for about 20 percent of the population, most local schools do not teach in Adivasi languages. Dropout rates are

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MLE Research partnership for India Panel Discussion   Dear Multilingual Education Friends, Last month the English Partnerships team of the British Council of India convened a research round-table on multilingual education in India . The reason for the meeting was that the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading had proposed a collaborative research partnership with Indian universities and institutions to investigate the issues around multilingual literacy and education at the primary level in India. At the meetings, a framework was discussed for “setting up a longitudinal project into the role of mother tongues and regional languages in learning and teaching in India.” During one of the evenings, there was a panel discussion on the “Benefits and challenges of multilingual education in India” with several people included who are well known to many of us: Dr Dhir Jhingran (UNICEF India), Prof. Ianthi Tsimpli, Dr Rukmini Banerji (Pratham

Learning in English and mother tongue are not mutually exclusive   Kieran Cooke from the Universal Learning Solutions , claims that if a synthetic phonics approach for literacy is taken governments do not need to choose between the mother tongue and e.g. English but can do both simultaniously. The article on the World Education Blog   describes a Synthetic phonetic approach to reading as : "This approach teaches pupils letter sounds (for example, mmm not em, sss not es) and how to blend those sounds together to read words (so d-o-g makes ʻdogʼ). At the same time they learn how to write words by segmenting a word into its sounds, and then forming letters for those sounds." It then gives some examples from Africa which proof that also for non Mothertingue English children this approach gives better results than conventional methods. There is also a reference to India: "One study using this approach with Kannada-speaking children in India shows