Multilingual Education and India

It was quite energising to participate last week in the Asia-Pacific MLE conference in Bangkok. Having so many educationalists come together to learn about how multilingual education is implemented in different settings was inspiring. There were several presenters from India, but  the presentations from other countries were also quite relevant for the Indian context. The 7th International Conference on Language and Education was hosted by UNESCO in Bangkok from 4 to 6 October, 2023. The conference had 475 participants from civil society, academic institutions, and governments. High-level policymakers from over twenty governments in Asia and the Pacific also attended. The Indian government was represented by Ms. Archana Sharma Awasthi, Joint Secretary in the Department of School Education and Literacy, MHRD. India was quite prominently represented at  the conference. Prof. Tsimpli Ianthi shared on the first day about her research on the value of using multiple languages and experiments

    The new National Curriculum Framework 2023 that came out this week has a strong focus on multilingualism. It wants to ensure that, by age 15, students achieve academic proficiency in at least three languages. Multilingualism is seen as a way to enrich the classroom environment and broaden the thinking of the children. Good! Of course I was particularly interested to see how it deals with the local language. As this new framework came out this week, Upasana and I had a look at what it says about the use of the local language in the classroom. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 (NCF 2023) was released on the 23rd of August 2023. It has been building on the NCF for Foundations Stages that came out last year. (See our blogpost on the NCF for Foundations Stages from November 2022.) According to the address of K. Kasturirangan, the chairman of the National Steering Committee for National Curriculum Frameworks, this document is the first integrated Curriculum Framework for childre

In my report on the Multilingual Education Conference in Bangkok in 2019, I mentioned a presentation from Anjela Taneja from Oxfam. I was very glad to note that Anjela has now taken the time to turn her findings into a paper so that we can all benefit from it. Upasana Lepcha has written below a helpful summary of the paper. Oxfam India has released a comprehensive paper on Multilingual Education (MLE) The Right to Mother Tongue-Based Education in Tribal India: A Comparative Perspective by Anjela Taneja. The paper  examines already existing Mother-Tongue-Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) programmes in India for tribal populations. It brings to light the gaps and challenges facing MTB-MLE and makes recommendations on how to overcome them. The first part of the paper addresses the severe underuse of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in India and how this is especially crippling for the tribal children. Although tribals  constitute 8.6 percent of the total population (20

It is always good when things move from talking to action : In Assam new textbooks have been developed and distributed for the early grades that are in line with the New Education Policy. It is good to note that they have been produced in several local languages. Still it would be interesting to learn why certain languages are included while others are  not. According to the ANI Report , the Education Minister of Assam last week officially dispatched vehicles with 87.6 lakh  textbooks in local languages of Assam. The languages included are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Manipuri, Garo, Hmar, and English for Classes 1 to 3. This initiative comes under the NIPUN Assam Mission for the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) programme from the NEP or New Education Policy with special emphasis on teaching children in their mother tongue so as to promote Multilingual Education.  NIPUN is a flagship scheme under National Education Policy 2020 which seeks to achieve the foundational literacy and n