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

Children from China’s ethnic minorities face the dilemma common to ethnic minority children throughoutthe world: they often live on the geographic and socioeconomic margins of the dominant languagesociety. They frequently have only limited access to the national education system. When they do gainaccess to formal primary education, the medium of instruction is a language the children do not speakor understand.The PRC Constitution asserts the freedom of all nationalities to use and develop their languages,including the freedom to use the nationality languages as the media of instruction where conditionspermit. However, in many places, and for various reasons, the multilingual education implied in theConstitution has not been implemented (Kosonen 2005).Mother Tongue and Bilingual Education in ChinaMother tongue-based bilingual education has been implemented for some of the 56 recognizednationalities. However, multilingual education programmes can range from very weak to very strong,with many variations in between.A weak bilingual education programme uses the minority language only in the very early stage ofprimary education, usually one or two years at the most. The goal of weak programmes is to movethe children into the national language as soon as possible. These programmes are “weak” from thepoint of view of the mother language because they are not concerned with encouraging the childrento maintain their ethnic language. They are also weak from the national language point of view becausethe lack of time given to developing the learners’ mother tongue results in less effective learning in thesecond language.A strong bilingual education uses the minority learners’ mother tongue orally and in written form, alongwith the national language, all the way through the upper primary grades. This approach has the goal ofproducing children who are bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate in their mother tongue and the nationallanguage.Policies on Mother Tongue and Bilingual EducationIn China, as in many countries throughout the world, bilingual education 3 policies do not always matcheducational practice. During the past several years, the Government’s concern for and promotion ofits ethnic minority communities have been genuine, but its practice in terms of support for minoritylanguage education has been uncertain because of the national emphasis on Mandarin language3 It should be mentioned here that in Chinese there are several words that are translated as “bilingual education.”Not all of those terms include the idea of biliteracy—reading and writing in both languages—that is assumedwhen the term is used in this report.[ 75 ]