The Ethnic Council / National Assembly, especially the Vice Chairperson and the Deputy Director of the Ethnic Department, were important partners in promoting the MTBBE policy.
Did the project have policy support?
The Constitution, Education Law and other educational policy documents of Viet Nam have all provided support for the use of ethnic minority languages in education:
The State shall enable ethnic minority people to learn their spoken and written languages in order to preserve and develop their ethnic cultural identity( Article 7. The Education Law of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam). 14
When did the Action Research project begin and how did it develop?
In 2007, the MOET and UNICEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding( MOU) for the MTBBE Action Research project.
The plan was to track two cohorts of students from the three language communities from preschool through Grade 5.
Preparation included the following activities:
•• Select locations for the MTBBE Action Research schools;
••
Design and develop the methods, materials, teacher training curriculum, baseline surveys and mechanisms for measuring learning outcomes;
••
Raise awareness and mobilize support from policy makers, education managers, principals, teachers, students and community members;
••
Develop teaching and learning materials for pre-school, Grade 1 and Grade 2.
Between 2008 and 2014, curricula and teaching and learning materials were developed for preschool and for primary grades 1 to 5 with help from education experts and MT speakers from the three language communities.
Project leaders selected three languages as the MTs for the project, based on the following criteria:
••
Writing systems / scripts: The languages should have writing systems that are accepted by MT speakers, including those from different dialect areas. At least one of the languages should use a writing system that is different from Vietnamese. 15
••
Language use: Almost everyone in the selected communities should speak the same mother tongue. Children should have little or no exposure to Vietnamese before they begin school.
14 See http:// www. unicef. org / vietnam / brief _ TA. pdf
15 Vietnamese uses a Latin script. Some non-dominant languages in Viet Nam also use Latin scripts while other languages, such as Khmer, use a non-Latin script. Project designers set these criteria so they could compare the process of transferring between languages that share the same script and between languages that use different scripts.
Booklet for Case Studies
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