In the early years teachers worried that using the mother tongue would impede their students’ ability to learn Thai, the national language. However, support for the programme increased as people have seen that children in the MLE project enjoy coming to school and are confident in expressing themselves and responding to the teacher. Any remaining doubt turned to support when the teachers saw how quickly the children who had gained literacy in their MT were able to read and write in Thai.
Communities with good MTB MLE programmes report that now students love coming to school. Here is what Rajbanshi people in Nepal say about the children in their MTB MLE programme( one of the programmes described in the Case Studies booklet in this MTB MLE Resource Kit).
The students are ready to come to school even though it’ s just 8 o’ clock in the morning. They come early and enjoy playing with their friends. During the language session, they are fully engaged in the story. They are curious and have a great imagination. They have confidence in talking and asking questions. They learn mathematics from local materials and the teachers talk to them only in their mother tongue. They sing songs in local melodies. Even the snack is local food. Everything is so familiar to the students.
You can hear their laughter from far away. You can see their smiling faces all the time. They are happy. They love learning. They are not going to an alien place to study. School is just like their‘ home’.
Students and their parents are the most important stakeholders in MTB MLE programmes. Parents know that if their children are not doing well in their classes, the children will drop out of school. Therefore, they are very happy when they see that their children are excited about learning and love going to school. This is what people in the Benishangul Gumuz region of Ethiopia said about their MTB MLE programme:
Before, when our children went to school and everything was taught in Amharic, we saw how they were suffering and how disappointed they were. It was a very negative experience. Children dropping out of school— it was a normal occurrence. As parents, we were reluctant to bother sending them to school. But now they are learning in our own language... and they are excelling- not just in the mother tongue class, but in ALL their other classes too. They have become very clever!
Now we understand that our language is just as good as every other language. Before we thought it was inferior because our children were not learning in school. This gives us equal status with all other language groups.
Since our children now get a better education, our own interest in school is high. We now participate in all kinds of school-related activities: we help to take care of the school, and we meet to discuss the well-being of our children. This kind of thing never happened before( Blacksten, 2014, pp. 4-5).
Booklet for Community Members
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