Multilingual Education and India

This week is the International week of Sign Languages. When I watched a few years ago the Oscar winning short movie " The Silent Child ", it made a big impression on me: everywhere in the world many deaf children grow up without a language at all. What a tragedy!  In recent years more attention has been given to sign languages. Including in India. Still we have a long way to go! The International Day of Sign Languages , observed on September 23, promotes awareness of sign languages in ensuring equal rights for the deaf community and the last week of September is observed as the International week of the Deaf . This year’s theme  for the International Day of Sign Languages highlights inclusivity and accessible communication for all. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 63 million people in India have significant auditory impairment, which is roughly 6.3% of the population.  The National Education Policy 2020(NEP 2020) recognizes the importance of promotin

Congratulations on International Literacy Day! This year the focus was on multilingual education and therefore deserves a blog post! Both Cameroon and India have a lot of linguistic diversity. UNESCO chose Cameroon to celebrate and here in India it will be good to take note of what the government said. As a national MLE consortium we also made a brief video to get the perspective of civil society organisations. International Literacy Day (ILD) has been observed  since 1967 on the 8th of September. This day highlights the importance of literacy as a fundamental human right and its role in empowering individuals and advancing societies. In 2024, the theme centres on "Multilingual Education," emphasising the significance of learning in one's mother tongue or multiple languages for inclusive and equitable quality education. This year's theme resonates strongly with the goal of fostering linguistic diversity and promoting literacy in marginalised communities, particularly

It is not often that a webinar about MLE attracts a large group of participants, but if you have a relevant topic and good speakers  it can be done! The recent webinar on multilingual pedagogies dealt with a reality that we often face in Indian classrooms that multiple languages are spoken by the learners. The webinar speakers had a good mix of theory and practice. No wonder it attracted a broad audience! A Webinar: ‘Multilingual pedagogies for all: Language-inclusive teaching and learning’ was hosted by The Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group, UNESCO Bangkok and UNICEF East Asia and Pacific on the 9th of July 2024. The presentations were aimed at discussing practical solutions for preparing teachers to lead multilingual classrooms through best practice models in various countries such as India, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia. The speakers were Kathleen Heugh from the University of South Australia, Sangsok Son from SIL Intl, Dhir Jhingran of the Language and

It was good to attend the conference on “Language Education in Multilingual Contexts”  at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Such a large amount of abstracts that were sent in that they had to set a limit on the number of attendees and presenters. This shows that multilingual education is presently a hot topic. Good!  “Translanguaging” was the buzzword of the conference. Prof Ajit Mohanty commented that it seems like a ghost: Everybody talks about it but nobody has seen it. Fortunately,  Dr Sangsok Son used a helpful metaphor that made the concept more concrete: the mixing of languages in the classroom is like spinning a top. Overall it was good that after several years there was an India-based language conference again! (see overview ) The English and Foreign Languages University of Hyderabad (EFLU) Department of Materials Development, Testing, and Evaluation organised a two-day, International Conference on Language Education in Multilingual Contexts on 26th

Good to see that the Rajasthan government is taking concrete steps to bring the local languages into the classroom. It is particularly encouraging to note that this initiative is not only focusing on the language, but also including the culture and folklore. Still, the initiative is not fully in line with the National Education Policy and the common pedagogical consensus that the local language should be the language of instruction as the medium of instruction will remain Hindi. Nevertheless it is clearly a step in the right direction! According to news reports, the Rajasthan State Council of Educational Research and Training (RSCERT) has identified 18 dialects that will be integrated into classroom teaching for classes I to V in state schools in the 2024-25 academic year. The main aim is to reduce the gap between the home and school environments for students.( Education Times / Times of India ) Before this initiative a language mapping survey by RSCERT showed that 20% of teachers wer