Multilingual Education and India

Quality Training for teachers and policy makers on the topic of Multilingual Education has always been a challenge. It is therefore good to note that a Certificate Course is under development in collaboration with Guwahati University.

Dictionaries in 21 indigenous languages Over the last several weeks the Multilingual Education (MLE) program of the government of Odisha came 3 times to my attention: A presentation from the recent MLE conference in Bangkok, an excellent video clip explaining how the program works in the classroom and the news that 21 dictionaries were published.

Dr Michel Kenmogne gives a welcome speech at the reception on the first day of the conference. Last week I attended  the “Inclusion, Mobility and Multilingual Education Conference” in Bangkok. This time the MLE conference was done together with the British Council’s recurring conference on Language and Education which resulted in a larger and richer conference with about 450 participants from a broad range of disciplines participating. The topic of “inclusion and mobility” provided a good opportunity to link MLE to the increasing number of issues around migration and identity. At least 30 participants were from India, several of who gave a presentation. For now, we will give a few impressions with links to abstracts. At a later stage, the full presentations will become available.

Final Report “Early Literacy and Multilingual Education in South Asia”  A few months ago UNICEF published the final report on their research on Early Literacy and Multilingual Education in South Asia. The study is based on literature review on early literacy and multilingual education, surveys of students’ literacy achievements in primary grades, analysis of sociolinguistic situations, and policy and programme documents. That 100 page report is worth noting!

Reading is hard work, particularly in a language you hardly know!  (Photo Credit: Business Standard) This month there were plenty of articles in the newspaper talking about language and education because of the publication of the Draft National Education Policy (NEP) which stated: “Three-language formula will need to be implemented in its spirit throughout the country, promoting multilingual communicative abilities for a multilingual country.” Of course, there was the controversy around the promotion of Hindi, but there were also plenty of references to the value of multilingual education.