How did you use the national curriculum to develop the instructional plan for this programme?
As noted above, the programme begins in Kindergarten and continues to Grade 5, the last Grade in the government primary education programme. The government does not have a national curriculum for kindergarten so the programme team, with input from community members, developed the curriculum for that grade.
Instruction in Grades 1 to 5 is based on the national curriculum, but adjusted for this MTB MLE programme in two ways: 1) Lesson content builds on the students’ knowledge and experience; and 2) Nepali and English are not introduced together.
The MTB MLE programme teaches three languages as subjects and uses two of the three languages for instruction. One language is introduced at a time so that students can build confidence in their ability to speak, read and write each one.
Rajbanshi is the first language in this programme. Students already know the language because they hear and speak it at home. They learn to read and write in Rajbanshi in Term 2 of kindergarten and build fluency throughout that year and in Grade 1. They continue oral and written Rajbanshi as a subject all the way to Grade 5.
MTB MLE RESOURCE KIT Including the Excluded: Promoting Multilingual Education
Rajbanshi student reading a story in his MT. © SIL International, Nepal
Nepali, the national language and the official school language of Nepal, is the second language in this programme. Teachers introduce oral Nepali early in Grade 1 and help students build their vocabulary in that language. Rajbanshi and Nepali belong to the same“ family” of languages; 9 they share about 40 percent of their vocabulary and both use the
9 Nepali and Rajbanshi belong to the Indo-Aryan( Indic) branch of the Indo-European language family.
18