Abstract
It is estimated that 221 million primary-aged children from remote rural areas, linguistic minority, and ethnic communities who speak a different language at home and have no contact with the instructional language outside of the classroom do not have access to education and have the biggest problems in learning and understanding of the language taught at school. UNESCO notes that Africa is the only continent, where the majority of the children start schooling using a foreign language. For instance, in Zambia, where English was the educational language (among non-English speakers), it was found at the end of primary schooling that children were unable to read fluently or write clearly, and they failed examinations because they could not understand the instructions. The chapter focuses on the important issues of multilingual contexts in education and spread light to the factors that influence inclusion and academic achievement.
TopBackground
‘When pre-established pockets of marginalization, poverty, or poor teaching quality intersect with schooling in an unknown language, children may never make it to school, or if they do, will find little meaning in the classroom to keep them there’ (Pinnock, 2009)
In today’s world, providing quality education for all children implies taking into account many varied cultural and linguistic contexts that exist in our societies. In fact, educational policy-makers are confronted with the challenge to ensure language educational standards for the whole population of a country, while at the same time protecting the rights of those who belong to specific linguistic and ethnic populations because ensuring inclusive education, guaranteeing all children’s right to education, involves providing education to minority groups in their own language or mother tongue. Hornby (2010) defined mother tongue as the language you first learn to speak when you are a child i.e., a primary language; or the language one identifies with or is identified as a native speaker of by others, or the language a child first learns in the immediate community (Hawkins, 1995). It is the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another, the most powerful form of symbolization and a divine gift, bringing them a sense of solidarity in their culture (Appelbaum & Chambliss, 1995). Moreover, Bonny Norton (2013) posits that mother language “serves to construct our sense of selves - our subjectivity, and mediates our knowledge and understanding of the world; it is through it that we are able to “negotiate and renegotiate our sense of self in relation to the larger social world, and reorganize that relationship across time and space”.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Policy-Makers: Individuals who create ideas and plans, especially those carried out by a business or government. A mayor, a school board, a corporation's board of directors, Head teachers are all policy makers.
MTB-MLE: Other Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB MLE) programs serve learners of non-dominant language communities who do not understand or speak the language of instruction when they begin their formal education.
Language Discrimination: Language discrimination is a subset of national origin discrimination. Language discrimination refers to the unfair treatment of an individual based solely upon the characteristics of their speech such as, accent, size of vocabulary, and syntax. It can also involve a person's ability or inability to use one language instead of another.
Self-Efficacy: Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation. Psychologist Albert Bandura described these beliefs as determinants of how people think and behave.
Language Deprivation: Language deprivation is associated with the lack of linguistic stimuli that are necessary for the language acquisition processes in an individual.
Linguistic Human Rights: Linguistic rights are the human and civil rights concerning the individual and collective right to choose the language or languages for communication in a private or public conversation.
Cognitive Skills: Cognitive-achievement models were estimated with Basic Reading Skills, Reading Rate, and Reading Comprehension factors as outcome variables. Cognitive skills include perception, attention, memory, and logical reasoning.
Mother Tongue: Native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period.