Language and Education: The missing link

A presentation on is the UNICEF report " Language and education: The missing link" which describes language policy planning, Native languages, Importance of Native languages in schools and their role in (re)vitalization in language and culture.

1. Language and education: The missing link Zia ur Rehman Bazai

2. An African voice… I know that I wasn’t born there and everything like that, but I just feel like my parents being from there, I’m from there too. Like I just accept it, like you know? I try my best to speak the language, I understand it fluently, speaking it, you know, I have a little bit of an American accent. When I say something, sometimes I’m laughed at. But you know, just the effort, I just try. I don’t want to lose that culture. I feel like it’s rich... So if I just identify myself as American and just lose that, not even throw the African in there or anything like that, I just feel like it would be lost, the culture, so I want to continue it. (Jake, Interview, 1/17/2009)

3. Another African American Voice… But I can see that even now in some of my cousins or even people at school, with the kids that I work with, they’re like—when I ask them or I look up their last names, I’m like, Oh, you’re from Africa. Where are you from specifically? And you can see them kind of bashfully tell me where they’re from, and you can tell there’s a sense of shame in that, and that’s really unfortunate. (Tinda, Interview, 2/15/2009)

4. A language about which the learners do not know is a barrier for them Unfortunately some educational systems welcome linguistic diversities  Providing education in any other language means that you are forcing learners to understand a language not to build a new knowledge Many fail to learn either the school language or the language of their parents; large number drop out

5. EVIDENCE ON THE ROLE SCHOOL LANGUAGE PLAYS IN EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS OR FAILURE Language pulls down the educational performance of many of those who do not use it at home. Negative impact comes when the teaching is not in the language which known by the learner. Children learn based on linking new knowledge to what is already familiar to them Sudden shifts in an unfamiliar language sever those links The educational problems can be addressed successfully by providing at least 6 years of mother tongue education

6. WHICH COUNTRIES ARE WORST AFFECTED World’s most linguistically diverse societies many of which use a single national or international languages for schooling

7. ACTION FOR EDUCATION LEADERS AND PLANNERS Inappropriate language of instruction is relatively easy to remove from the cocktail/mixture of quality teaching When planned and resourced well, mother tongue based bilingual or multilingual education can have substantial positive impact on education access and quality In a rural area the local lingua Franca would be a far better choice for medium of instructions Language is not an issue limited to a few communities a few groups or a few countries it affects every aspect and outcome of education system world wide  44 percent of languages spoken by more than 10000 people are not used as languages of instruction inn education

8. IS TEACHING IN CHILDRENS FIRST LANGUAGE DESIRABLE OR ESSENTIAL\ It has been proved that mother tongue offers the best chance of educational success

9. MAKING CHOICES ABOUT SCHOOL LANGUAGE It is important to recognize a range of cultural physiological and other contextual differences affection the way children learn and develop Learning a second language through schooling alone is likely to be much more difficult Examine or assessing a child in a language which they don’t use is likely to generate misleading knowledge about a child’s real level of skills and capabilities

10. DRIVERS OF SCHOOL LANGUGE CHOICE Barriers arise when child’s home and school language do not match Drivers indicate that children need to become fluent users of a national or international language Government also promotes one language policy

11. EVIDENCES ON THE IMPACT OF POOR SCHOOL LANGUAGE CHOICES If education officials are made aware that mother tongue teaching works better this may not be enough to prompt In survey = repetition rates in bilingual MT schools =25% = repetition rates in monolingual schools= 47% A test was conducted in which it was found that students scored worse in math and science , because there was a difference between the languages of test and home

12. Political and social effects of language, related exclusion from education. Group inequality can be a strong predictor o violent conflict particularly when an excluded group has a common identity Division between ethnic and linguistic groups contribute significantly to weaker institutions and slow economic growth Education policy can either increase linguistic fractionalization or it can reduce it

13. Tensions over language 1952== E ast Pak, 1976==South Africa 1990s ==KOSOVO 2004 =SYRIA (Kurdish language)

14. Children out-of-school World Wide Approximately 221 million primary-aged children worldwide are estimated not to have access to schooling in their mother tongues (Walter, 2004) Over half of the world’s out-of-school children are estimated to live in regions where their own languages are not used at school (world bank, 2005) 54 million out-of-school children live in countries economists classify as ‘highly linguistically fractionalized’ These highly risked countries account for 58% of Primary-aged children (UNESCO, 2008) which accounts 72% of out-of-school children worldwide

15. Rural area Students Language unknown to primary students have higher ratio of drop-outs. The highest level of dropout in rural areas students linked to unfamiliar school language taught in school (Smits et al, 2008 ) For rural areas in particular, the wrong choice of school language is likely to be the deciding factor in large numbers of dropouts, and children achieving lower skills on leaving school than expected.

16. Donor agencies: part of the solution?

17. Pakistan, a Case study

18. Pakistan…

19. Pakistan…

20. Enrolment

21. Pakistan…

22. Pakistan…

23. Conclusion There is now clear evidence that, for children who do not have dominant languages in their daily lives, using that language for teaching significantly damages their education ‘…the cost and the consequences of not using [local, non-prestige] languages in education are going to be extremely high. The higher the percentage of a nation’s population which speak such languages, the higher the long term cost in terms of educational failure and under- or nondevelopment .’ ( Walter, 2000)

24. Daira Manana