Friday, January 8, 2010

From mother-tongue to many tongues

"From mother-tongue to many tongues" is the title of my article in the current issue of the magazine Teacher Plus. The essay argues that a mother-tongue based multilingual education is both necessary and do-able.

The editors gave me a thousand-word limit. Listing all the references would have eaten up a large part of that word limit. So, I've re-published the article (with minor changes, and all the references) on my website. Do read "From mother-tongue to many tongues".

Comments, as always, welcome!

3 comments:

Nebel said...

Nice job

Anonymous said...

Nice article. But I was just wondering about workable solutions?

Last August, in a test administered by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development called PISA test focused on science, Finnish students came out almost on top in every category. Europeans, other than the British, are usually dubbed poor in English (wrongly diagnosed because of their spoken skills, I presume). The Finnish schools leveraged on a simple phenomena to improve their students’ English vocab. Finnish media do not dub English serials or soap operas into the lingua franca, but show them with subtitles in Finnish. This seems to have greatly helped the kids pick up good English.

Mother tongue to many tongues, so to say…

Can you throw more light on this…

Starting L2 as early as possible, and teaching as much of the curriculum as possible through the L2 does not result in effective or widespread L2 acquisition.

Any empirical backup?

गिरिधर | giridhar | గిరిధర్ said...

The piece is now up on the Teacher Plus site.

"Anonymous" (i.e. Sharat) has posted his question there as well: "Any empirical backup?" Do see my response there.