Mother Tongue-based Literacy Programmes: Case Studies of Good ...

legitimacy to these efforts, the orthography of the Bunong language (in addition to other languages)has already been approved by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.The situation in the state of Bangladesh is quite different from Cambodia. Ninety-eight percent ofBangladeshis speak Bangla, the national language. Among the remaining 2 percent, there are about 29ethnic minority groups seeking government attention for their growth and development. The literacyrate among these communities has remained very low. According to the country’s 1991 Census, only14.1 percent of the tribal population is literate, and the rate for females drops to a low of 7.14 percent. Atleast part of the poor enrolment and high dropout rate among the tribal population can be attributedto vast cultural differences and language barriers operating within the schools. Schools simply do nothave adequate numbers of teachers who can speak the children’s languages. It is widely recognized thatthe use of Bangla as the medium of instruction in schools has placed the children from tribal groups ina disadvantageous position. A gradual erosion of indigenous languages is taking place, transformingmany ethnic groups as bilinguals speaking mother tongue mutated with Bangla, and alienating theyoung from their own culture. Surprisingly, even the national literacy movements used only Bangla asthe medium of instruction for all, irrespective of their ethnic and linguistic minority affiliation. It is inthis context that the present effort marks a renewed recognition of the value of using mother tongue inimparting education.The Indian education system officially follows the 3-language formula in an attempt to address thechallenges and opportunities of the linguistic wealth in the country. The formula envisages that everychild will learn the mother tongue or regional language, Hindi and English as part of school education.The National Policy on Education adopted in 1986 states that home languages of children should be themedium of learning in schools. But this has not effectively solved the problem of divergence betweenmother tongue and the language of learning in school for many children because most of the statesin India have a multilingual population. The situation is even more acute in the northeastern region ofthe country, which includes the State of Assam, with a high concentration of diverse ethno-linguisticpopulations. While the official language of Assam is Assamese, there are about 23 ethnic minoritycommunities that use 92 non-scheduled languages. Most of these linguistic groups do not have a scriptof their own, as is the case in Bangladesh. The Rabha ethnic community, for example, has a populationof 236,931 who speak the Rabha language and use either Roman, Devanagari or the Assamese scripts. Itis in this fragile linguistic context threatening the very survival of the Rabha language that the presentaction project on bilingual education has been implemented.The study in China was conducted with the minority ethnic group whose mother tongue is Kam, whilemandarin is the majority language of the country. The total population of the Kam-speaking communityliving in Guizhou Province of south central China is around 2.96 million. They are well-known for theircultural flamboyance and musical abilities. Even their speaking seems musical: the Kam language hasnine tones, which means that many words can only be distinguished by the pitch of the speaker’s voice.Kam has a strong oral culture that is rich in story-telling: myths, ancient songs, legends, folk tales, folksongs, long narrative poems, riddles, shuochang (which combines poetry and prose) and drama. Kamis one of several such minority language groups in China who feel handicapped due to the absence offacilities for learning through their mother tongue. Keeping this in view, ethnic minority communitieshave planned and implemented some interesting educational experiments; the Kam/Mandarin BilingualEducation Pilot Project is one such experiment. It is different from other countries’ programmes becausehere the impetus has come from within the community, which gives a larger scope for active communitysupport and sustainability beyond the present action project.[ 11 ]