“Beta…put your shoes” “Stop now” “Go in the queue”
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I firmly believe in primary education in mother language. However, I am still okay if you put your kids in non-mother-language system as long as you at home and teachers at school use mother-language for normal conversations/communication and confines English to curriculum only.
Sadly, that is not happening. It is unfortunate to know that modern schools strictly go with English by gungho and even denies mother language at school. Give yellow flag to innocent kid if he or she speaks in native language. Even parents start speaking in English with 2 years old at home :(. Those living abroad, should at least speak in Gujarati at home.
They do not know that student learning can be accurately assessed in bilingual classrooms. When students can express themselves, teachers can diagnose what has been learned, what remains to be taught and which students need further assistance. In submersion schooling cognitive learning and language learning are confounded, making it difficult for teachers to determine whether students have difficulty understanding the concept itself, the language of instruction, or the language of the test.
Take care while deciding school for your kid. And share this report with idiotic school management who forces exclusive English for even normal conversation. If you do not find quality school for mother language, go with school where medium of instruction is in Gujarati/Mother language but syllabus in English.
Research findings:
• Modiano’s (1973) study in the Chiapas highlands of Mexico found that indigenous children efficiently transferred literacy skills from the L1 to the L2 and out-performed monolingual Spanish speakers. Modiano also qualitatively explored how teachers from the same linguistic and cultural communities as their students were uniquely suited for their work.
• The Six-Year Yoruba Medium Primary Project (Fafunwa et al. 1975; Akinnaso 1993; see Adegbiya 2003 for other references) demonstrated unequivocally that a full six-year primary education in the mother tongue with the L2 taught as a subject was not only viable but gave better results than all-English schooling. It also suggested that teachers should be allowed to specialize in L2 instruction.
• The Rivers Readers Project, also in Nigeria, showed how mother tongue materials of reasonable quality could be developed even where resources were scarce and even for previously undeveloped languages with small numbers of speakers (Williamson, 1976). Communities themselves provided competent native speakers and funds for language development, producing over forty publications in fifteen languages.
• Large-scale research on Filipino-English bilingual schooling in the Philippines (Gonzalez & Sibayan, 1988) found a positive relationship between achievement in the two languages, and found that low student performance overall was not an effect of bilingual education but of other factors, especially the low quality of teacher training (see also Dutcher 1995).
Read more here: http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/8301903707a556115649c7e3cf06c1c3Benson+Language+instruction.doc
