••‘ Lub’ stands for Lubuagan, a language spoken in northern Luzon in the Philippines;
••‘ PM’ stands for Patani Malay, the primary language in the southern provinces of Thailand;
•• Kom is the name of the language spoken by the Kom people in Cameroon;
••‘ Eng’ stands for English, the official school language in Cameroon and the Philippines;
•• The letter‘ G’ stands for Grade;
••
“ General”, as in“ Lub G3 General Eng” means that the assessment covered several basic language tasks;
•• The lightly shaded bars show the performance of children in non-MLE schools;
••
The darker bars show the performance of children in the MTB MLE schools.
Figure 1: Comparison of MLE and non-MLE programmes with respect to students’ proficiency in the official school / national language
Philippines
Lub G3 General Eng.
Lub G1 General Eng.
Thailand
PM G1 Writing in Thai
PM G3 General Thai
Cameroon
PM G1 General Thai
Kom G6 English Vocabulary
Kom G3 Eng. Reading Comp.
Standard MT-medium
Kom G1 Oral English
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Group Averages( percent)
The results shown in Figure 1 seem to be typical of what happens when MTB MLE students are compared with non-MLE students from the same MT community on their ability to use the official school language: Children in MLE classes consistently show an advantage of 30-60 percent over students in the same grades in non-MLE classes.
In Figure 1, the result for Kom G1 Oral English( the official school language) is the most reliable of these comparisons because the research team used the same assessment to test students each year for three years. Approximately 300 Kom students in the MLE schools and in the non-
Booklet for Policy Makers
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