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Promoting Multilingual
Education
Including the Excluded
UNESCO advocates and supports the use
of mother tongue instruction as a means
of improving educational quality as well as
saving the world’s many endangered
languages.
Sheldon Shaeffer
UNESCO Asia & Pacific
Overview
Education for All (EFA) means a quality
education for all.
Language in
Education Policy and Practice
in Asia and the Pacific
2. East Asia
●People’s Republic of China (200) – Mandarin Chinese
●Mongolia (12) – Mongolian
●Japan (2) – Japanese
5. Pacific
●Papua New Guinea (850)
UNESCO’s three-part rationale for supporting
multilingual education:
Children who do not speak the OSSL when they begin school face
special challenges:
•Learn the official school language, at the same time,
understand the new things taught to them [in the new
language]
•Try to understand the lessons in the textbooks.
*Memorization is not the same as understanding.
•To be able to read and write in the new language
*The children seemed totally uninterested in the
teacher’s monologue.
*…frightening them, rather than encouraging them
to learn…
*When a dominant language is the only language
used in the classroom and when lessons focus only
on the dominant society, minority children may
forget their own language, and lose their
Minority language learners who must attend
schools that use a language they do not know
face a host of educational, social, and other
problems:
Q1: What is the educational situation for people who do not speak official school
language?
•People whose home languages are different from official school languages are likely
to suffer from a lack of educational access and/or quality.
•Many, especially those in remote areas, have no access to schools at all, or have
schools but not teacher
If there are schools and teachers, the teachers are unlikely to share the
students’ social and cultural background or to speak the student’s language.
•Teaching materials and textbooks (if there are any) are in language the students do
not understand.
Lessons ignore the students’ own knowledge and experience, and give the
impression that only the dominant language and culture are important.
•Because the students do not understand the school language- and therefore the
lesson content- many of them do not do well in their classes. They have to repeat
grades and eventually become discouraged and leave school altogether.
Q2: What is mother tongue-based Multilingual Education (MLE) and how does it
help students to Do better in school?
MLE solution: students begin school using their first language. If students from
several language groups are in the same class, a local lingua franca may be
used.
Problem in mainstream schools
students must learn increasingly abstract concepts using the new language
before they have built the vocabulary in that language to understand or apply
the concepts
MLE solution: In the early grades, teachers use the student’s known language
to teach academic concepts. At the same time, the students begin learning the
new language, fist orally and then reading and writing.
MLE programmes should produce students
who are:
Multilingual
Multiliterate
Multicultural
Q3: What is the process by which children go from
their first language to the official language in school?
•Students begin to learn the new language, first orally and then
written form. However, they do not stop using their first language
as soon as they have achieved basic competency in the new
language. Rather, they continue using both languages for
learning, at least through primary school.
Research Strategies
Raising awareness and mobilizing partners:
•Training
•Materials
•Student progress
•Cost effectiveness