The goal throughout this process is that teachers will have the strong curriculum and good teaching materials they will need to help students build competence and confidence in hearing, speaking, reading and writing all their school languages and achieve success in all their subjects.
Example from Thailand: Curriculum development for the Patani Malay-Thai MTB BE programme
Patani Malay and Thai educators developed the curriculum for the Patani Malay-Thai MTB BE programme. This is an eight-year programme that begins with two years of kindergarten( KG) and continues to the end of Grade 6. The programme teaches Patani Malay( PM) as a subject and uses it as language of instruction in early grades. Standard Thai, the official language, is taught as a subject each year. The goal is that students will achieve government standards for each grade while acquiring standard Thai as a second language. The MTB BE curriculum for each grade is based directly on the Ministry of Education curriculum for mainstream Thai schools. It uses a learner-centred approach that enables students to“ build bridges” between what they already know and the new concepts they need to learn.
Home language and culture Local language( PM)
Spoken language
School language and culture
Official language( Thai) and other languages
Written language“ Everyday” language Academic language
MTB MLE RESOURCE KIT Including the Excluded: Promoting Multilingual Education
Language development. The MTB BE curriculum follows the step-by-step model described earlier in this booklet. In early KG1, students build confidence in using“ everyday MT” to listen and talk about familiar topics. Later in KG1 they begin pre-reading and prewriting activities in PM. In KG2 they begin reading and writing PM. Students continue studying PM as a subject through Grade 4 but as more languages 7 are added, the amount of time for studying PM in Grades 5-6 decreases significantly.
The curriculum introduces oral Thai in KG1, semester 2. Students begin bridging to written Thai early in Grade 1 and continue to build oral and written Thai to the end of primary school. They begin learning oral English, the second official school language, in Grade 2 and in Grade 3 they begin studying Jawi Melayu( Arabic script) and standard Malay( roman script).
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