Tongue-based Multilingual Education Research Articles

Awareness of Tribal Parents for Enrolling Their Children in Primary Education: Chittagong Hill Tracks

Primary education is the constitutional right in Bangladesh and one of the most basic needs on which the nation is built. Nailing this point the paper is aimed to investigate the awareness level of tribal parents to let their children admission in primary schools. The study sets three research questions focusing the awareness of parents and intends to explore the obstacles in path of education. There are 250 tribal parents selected purposively from Khagrachari district of Bangladesh. The sample size consists two areas of tribal parents urban and rural, both areas are entailed literate and illiterate parents of primary school student. The primary data has been collected based on questionnaire survey. The study selects the variables regarding awareness enrollment initiatives while statistical tool (t-test) is used to know awareness level of tribal parents about enrollment of primary education. Finally, the important thing in all scenarios that the researchers have found significant differences in awareness between rural compare to urban as well as literate and illiterate tribal parents about enrollment on primary education of their children. The identified major challenges are the poverty, insufficient infrastructure, unskilled teacher, lack of awareness and proper monitoring for bridging the gap between home and school through mother tongue-based bi or multilingual education in primary school.

Mother-tongue education in South Africa: A highly contested terrain of the 21st century

Mother-tongue education is considered a waste of time if the interests of people, plan, power and business are not aligned. In this article, suggestions are made regarding the way forward for African academics implementing mother-tongue education in primary and secondary schools, as well as in colleges and universities. Mother- tongue education has been debated extensively, but with little effect on language policies. Ineffective efforts to introduce mother-tongue education have negatively affected people’s lives. In Tanzania, for example, the imposition of Kiswahili in the educational sector has done an untold amount of as-yet-undocumented damage to the local indigenous languages of that country. The imposition of Kiswahili overlooked the value of mother- tongue-based multilingual education and has certainly confined and limited people. Mother-tongue education is highly contested in Africa due to the discourse of multilingualism. Africa is linguistically diverse, with over 2 000 languages. Multilingualism refers to the plethoric nature of languages in one nation, for example, South Africa has 11 official languages and Nigeria has more than 200 widely spoken languages. Language policy makers and strategic language planners should avoid being overconfident when looking at language because it is a landscape that can change at any time.

Inclusive Education in Thailand after 1999 National Education Act: A Review of a Pre-Service Teacher Education System

In Thailand after 1999 National Education Act., education policy of the government was shifted to the target of Education for All. In 2008 reviews were conducted in seven project countries except in Thailand. Some major gaps were identify such as the gap between pre-service teacher education and what follows throughout the teacher's career, as well as the gap between the best and worst practices of inclusive right-based education in the region.This study aims to identify both the gaps and omissions with regard to the inclusion of human rights, gender equality multilingual mother-tongue-based educational inclusive of marginalized, underprivileged groups, as well as special education, with policies, curricular material and pedagogy of pre-service teacher training institutes in four regions.The study was carried out mainly with qualitative method. The data were obtained from the two parts of data collection: documentary study and analysis of curriculum of sixteen teacher training institutes in four regions.It was found that: 1) the policy analysis revealed that the Ministry of Education launched supporting scheme to strive to Education for All, 2) the pre-service teacher training policy revealed that there was no explicit item related to rights based, opportunities, limitation of students to attend schools, gender promotion, or mother tongue based multilingual education. There were few universities provided clear issues in human rights education, 3) provision of knowledge, formation of attitude, behaviours and skills necessary for a thoroughly understanding and practice of a right-based teaching were integrated into special education and inclusive education courses. All sixteen sampling institutes offered a course or two in Special Education and Inclusive education, and teaching material and pedagogical aspects, stressed issues in education for special needs.In conclusion, every in-service teaching institute provided special education or inclusive education course. It was believed that experiences from the course would help students develop attitude, value and respect toward persons with special needs. As for issues of gender education, human rights education and mother -tongue-based multilingual education, there was still the gap between pre-service teacher education and practical work among school teachers.