Bilingual education: Is the revolution in favor of children's right to learn in a language they understand losing ground?

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Three countries in this panel represent diverse cultural, linguistic and geographic contexts. However, they have one thing in common: all three, over at least the past decade, have been gradually introducing a revolution in how foundational education is delivered in public schools. In Mozambique, Senegal and the Philippines, many children now begin school in a language they understand, and gradually shift to the language of instruction—Portuguese, French or English (and Filipino)--in upper primary. The political will and mobilization of resources that has been required for such fundamental shifts has been considerable, made possible through international cooperation, academic lobbying, and high-level policy decisions—much less so through protest or voices from the front lines (students, teachers, parents).

Language policy in education has always been a contested space, and perhaps oddly, colonial languages in education were not always ousted along with the colonial rulers. In Mozambique, post-independence socialist ideals promoted education for the masses but also unity and nation-building, and consequently Portuguese was considered the sole language of formal education. It was only after the end of the civil war, in 1992, that local languages were given a place. (Author, 2023). In Senegal, the Modèle Harmonisé d'Enseignement Bilingue au Sénégal (MOHEBS, Unified Framework for Bilingual Education in Senegal) was developed by the Ministry of Education to make the use of national languages officially part of the national education strategy. After many years of small-scale pilots demonstrating the positive effects of mother-tongue based instruction in the early grades, the MOHEBS introduces a strategy for gradually shifting to the mother-tongues as the language of instruction, with gradual introduction to French as a second language, and French as the medium of instruction in later primary and beyond. The shift to national languages has been the subject of a multi-year transition strategy and roadmap, supported by development partners, including USAID under government-to-government and implementing partner funding mechanisms. The bilingual education model is still early in its scale-up nationwide, unlike the Philippines, where the mother tongue-based multilingual education strategy has is nearly 10 years old. The Philippines has been influenced by Spanish and American colonial legacy, as well as displacement and migration internationally and among the thousands of islands that make up the nation. After independence from foreign rule, the Philippine government established a new nationally-unifying language—Filipino (largely based on one predominant vernacular, Tagalog)--but over the years shifts in policy have implemented some form of multilingual education that ultimately conserves English proficiency as an important skill for international communication and opportunity; Filipino for national unity; and local languages as cultural heritage. After 10 years of a formal MTB-MLE policy in which children learn in their mother tongue and gradually shift to Filipino and English as MOI, politicians are poised to retract the policy and go back to single or dual language immersion, regardless of the child's mastery of that language. In Mozambique, a new Bilingual Education Expansion Strategy 2020–29 recognizes that the bilingual education program faces major implementation challenge, including that parents and guardians often resist enrolling children in bilingual education.

Despite the well-documented evidence and human-rights based common wisdom that children should learn in a language they understand, practical considerations often get in the way: perceived status, cost of redeveloping materials, lack of trained teachers or lack of standardized scripts in non-dominant languages are all challenges (UNESCO). In 1925 the Monroe Education Survey Commission in the Philippines (under American occupation) stated that “...the foreign medium of instruction was the greatest handicap in schoolwork,” but also the “most serviceable solution and the one open to the fewest objections." (cited in McEachern, 2013). Indeed, in all three countries, parents sometimes resist the use of national languages out of fear of losing the ability to speak the international, post-colonial languages, perceived as the gateways for socioeconomic mobility; politicians often refer to their own experience learning successfully in the foreign language.

This panel explores the realities of three large-scale experiments in language policy shifts, and how policy ambitions often encounters very practical barriers to implementation. The three cases provide insight into how education reforms depends largely on how the frontline workers—schools and local governments—perceive and implement reforms (Aiyar et al. 2021).

The panel will discuss the following questions:
- Given the disconnect between policy ambitions and implementation realities, what are the risks that policies of bilingual education do not lead to expected implementation?

- What can we learn from effective programs and their design elements, especially those who were able to set-up for success from the start?

- How can we build long-term commitment, so that implementation continues even when it gets bumpy?

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Julie Belanger, Better Purpose

Chair

• Benjamin Piper, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Individual Presentations

• Philippines: A Longitudinal Study of Language and Literacy Acquisition amongst Grade 2-Grade 3 Learners in Three Mother-Tongue Learning Environments - Mitchell Rakusin, RTI International

• Meeting the challenges of bilingual education reforms in Senegal : Curriculum, communities and classroom-level change - Guitele Nicoleau, RTI Inernational; Awa Ka Dia, Associates in Research and Education for Development ARED

• Language and student learning in Mozambique: Evidence from an ethnographic study - Ritva Reinikka, Aalto University; Feliciano Chimbutane, Eduardo Mondlane University

Discussant

• Barbara Trudell, SIL Africa Learning & Development