From Yu Nankai, kindergarten teacher / training supervisor, Dai Han Bilingual Education Project in China: When we first started teaching students in this BE project [ in 2007 ], all the primary school teachers at our school believed our students would be the least prepared for primary school because they had started their schooling in Dai [ rather than the national language, Mandarin Chinese ]. Nobody wanted to have our kids in their first grade classes after they finished kindergarten. Almost ten years later, students coming out of our project classes are the ones that those same teachers want to have in their classes. They no longer avoid our students, but instead compete to get them in their classes! Why? Because they have found them to be the best prepared, the most cognitively developed among their peers. This project is worth it. Starting these kids’ education in their mother tongue works.( Translation by Heidi Cobbey, SIL International, Dai-Han BE Project facilitator.)
MTB MLE RESOURCE KIT Including the Excluded: Promoting Multilingual Education
From the school principal, Khmer-Kinh Bilingual Education school, Trà Vinh Province, Viet Nam: MTB BE students are able to know and understand more about their language and culture than those of non-MTB BE programme, though they are all Khmer students. I can express the difference between the two groups of students as follows: Non-MTB BE students have good achievement as well, but MTB BE students have more understanding. MTB BE students are more confident in daily life than the other group of students. Non-MTB BE students sometimes are quite timid, for instance, a Grade 1 student may not understand the command“ sit down”. Obviously, the main differences between the two group of students is that MTB BE students learn in their mother tongue, and when they transit to Vietnamese, they are more active and more confident in taking part in learning activities, even in their daily life as well. Students like to take part in the MTB BE programme very much. But also some non-MTB BE students have asked me“ Why could we not attend the MTB BE programme?” This question shows that these students perceived that by engaging to this programme, student can learn in Khmer, and have more opportunity to sing, play and dance in Khmer.( Translation by Dinh Phuong Thao, Education Specialist, UNICEF, Viet Nam.)
From parents of students in MTB MLE schools, Benishangul Gumuz region, Ethiopia Before, when our children went to school and everything was taught in Amharic [ the national language of Ethiopia ], we saw how they were suffering and how disappointed they were. It was a very negative experience. Children dropping out of school was a normal occurrence. As parents, we were reluctant to bother sending them to school. But now they are learning in our own language, the mother tongue as medium of instruction, and they are excelling— not just in the mother tongue class, but in ALL their other classes too. They have become very clever!
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