A presentation on is the UNICEF report " Language and education: The missing link" which describes language policy planning, Native languages, Importance of Native languages in schools and their role in (re)vitalization in language and culture.

1. Language and education:
The missing link
Zia ur Rehman Bazai

2. An African voice…
 I know that I wasn’t born there and everything like that, but I
just feel like my parents being from there, I’m from there
too. Like I just accept it, like you know? I try my best to
speak the language, I understand it fluently, speaking it, you
know, I have a little bit of an American accent. When I say
something, sometimes I’m laughed at. But you know, just the
effort, I just try. I don’t want to lose that culture. I feel like
it’s rich... So if I just identify myself as American and just
lose that, not even throw the African in there or anything like
that, I just feel like it would be lost, the culture, so I want to
continue it. (Jake, Interview, 1/17/2009)

3. Another African American Voice…
But I can see that even now in some of my cousins or
even people at school, with the kids that I work with,
they’re like—when I ask them or I look up their last
names, I’m like, Oh, you’re from Africa. Where are you
from specifically? And you can see them kind of
bashfully tell me where they’re from, and you can tell
there’s a sense of shame in that, and that’s really
unfortunate. (Tinda, Interview, 2/15/2009)

4.  A language about which the learners do not know is a
barrier for them
 Unfortunately some educational systems welcome linguistic
diversities
 Providing education in any other language means that you
are forcing learners to understand a language not to build a
new knowledge
 Many fail to learn either the school language or the
language of their parents; large number drop out

5. EVIDENCE ON THE ROLE SCHOOL LANGUAGE
PLAYS IN EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS OR
FAILURE
 Language pulls down the educational performance of many of
those who do not use it at home.
 Negative impact comes when the teaching is not in the
language which known by the learner.
 Children learn based on linking new knowledge to what is
already familiar to them
 Sudden shifts in an unfamiliar language sever those links
 The educational problems can be addressed successfully by
providing at least 6 years of mother tongue education

6. WHICH COUNTRIES ARE WORST AFFECTED
 World’s most linguistically diverse societies
many of which use a single national or
international languages for schooling

7. ACTION FOR EDUCATION LEADERS AND
PLANNERS
 Inappropriate language of instruction is relatively easy to remove from the
cocktail/mixture of quality teaching
 When planned and resourced well, mother tongue based bilingual or
multilingual education can have substantial positive impact on education
access and quality
 In a rural area the local lingua Franca would be a far better choice for
medium of instructions
 Language is not an issue limited to a few communities a few groups or a
few countries it affects every aspect and outcome of education system
world wide
 44 percent of languages spoken by more than 10000 people are not used
as languages of instruction inn education

8. IS TEACHING IN CHILDRENS FIRST
LANGUAGE DESIRABLE OR ESSENTIAL
 It has been proved that mother tongue
offers the best chance of educational
success

9. MAKING CHOICES ABOUT SCHOOL
LANGUAGE
 It is important to recognize a range of cultural
physiological and other contextual differences affection
the way children learn and develop
 Learning a second language through schooling alone is
likely to be much more difficult
 Examine or assessing a child in a language which they
don’t use is likely to generate misleading knowledge
about a child’s real level of skills and capabilities

10. DRIVERS OF SCHOOL LANGUGE CHOICE
 Barriers arise when child’s home and school language
do not match
 Drivers indicate that children need to become fluent
users of a national or international language
 Government also promotes one language policy

11. EVIDENCES ON THE IMPACT OF POOR
SCHOOL LANGUAGE CHOICES
 If education officials are made aware that mother
tongue teaching works better this may not be enough to
prompt
 In survey = repetition rates in bilingual MT schools =25%
 = repetition rates in monolingual schools= 47%
 A test was conducted in which it was found that
students scored worse in math and science , because
there was a difference between the languages of test
and home

12. Political and social effects of language,
related exclusion from education.
 Group inequality can be a strong predictor o violent
conflict particularly when an excluded group has a
common identity
 Division between ethnic and linguistic groups contribute
significantly to weaker institutions and slow economic
growth
 Education policy can either increase linguistic
fractionalization or it can reduce it

13. Tensions over language
 1952==East Pak,
 1976==South Africa
 1990s ==KOSOVO
 2004 =SYRIA (Kurdish language)

14. Children out-of-school World Wide
 Approximately 221 million primary-aged children worldwide are
estimated not to have access to schooling in their mother tongues
(Walter, 2004)
 Over half of the world’s out-of-school children are estimated to live in
regions where their own languages are not used at school (world bank,
2005)
 54 million out-of-school children live in countries economists classify as
‘highly linguistically fractionalized’
 These highly risked countries account for 58% of Primary-aged children
(UNESCO, 2008) which accounts 72% of out-of-school children worldwide

15. Rural area Students
 Language unknown to primary students have higher ratio of
drop-outs.
 The highest level of dropout in rural areas students
linked to unfamiliar school language taught in school
(Smits et al, 2008)
 For rural areas in particular, the wrong choice of
school language is likely to be the deciding factor in
large numbers of dropouts, and children achieving
lower skills on leaving school than expected.

22. Donor agencies: part of the solution?

27. Pakistan, a Case study

28. Pakistan…

29. Pakistan…

30. Enrolment

31. Pakistan…

33. Pakistan…

34. Conclusion
 There is now clear evidence that, for children who
do not have dominant languages in their daily lives,
using that language for teaching significantly
damages their education
 ‘…the cost and the consequences of not using [local,
non-prestige] languages in education are going to be
extremely high. The higher the percentage of a
nation’s population which speak such languages, the
higher the long term cost in terms of educational
failure and under- or nondevelopment.’ (Walter,
2000)

35. Daira
Manana