Report : Language and Education - the missing link

There’s an interesting article on Guardian Weekly, Stark  lessons in mother tongues, about a new report from Save the Children/CfBT on Language and Education: The missing link (PDF) which shows how the marginalisation of student’s first languages means that UN targets for education in developing countries are unlikely to be met.

The report, called Language and Education: the Missing Link, claims that failure to provide schooling in the language that children are most familiar with – the one that they speak at home – is a root cause of education failure, leading to children dropping out of school early and resources being wasted because rates of attainment are slowed.

This is an interesting boost to mother tongue education proponants who have long been saying the same thing.  The report refers to the growing body of research which shows the benefits of investing in mother language provision. The main recommendation is to defer the learning of a second language – usually the ‘national’ language until upper primary school with the bulk of the curriculum being in a language the children know for the first years. This approach is called mother tongue-based multilingual education.

Key recommendations for education ministries and national education leaders from the report are:

• Establish a policy commitment to improving school language, based on an intention to progress towards evidence-based good practice.
• Make sure teachers understand that the more they help children use and develop their mother tongues, the better children are likely to do in educational performance, including second language skills.
• Emphasise that if transitions to a national or international language are unavoidable in the school cycle, this transition should be gradual.
• Prioritise parts of the country where national or foreign prestige languages are not extensively available in daily life, and where education outcomes are poor, for assistance to develop mother tongue based multilingual education approaches.
• Develop locally appropriate and flexible learning outcome targets for these regions.
• Where a large variety of local languages present challenges to teaching in everyone’s mother tongue, a common language may be necessary at first for delivering the majority