Language Education Outside the U.S.

Published by the Daily Nation, December 6, 2016

In the proposed structure, pupils will take two years in pre-primary and three years in lower primary schools of mother tongue instruction..

Published by Malta Today, Septemjber 29, 2016

Education minister says that exposure to two languages helps children's development and is at the core of Malta's economic success

Published by ABC Australia, September 19, 2016

 Two Adelaide schools have combined to offer a French and English bilingual program to students from reception through to year 12, a first for South Australia.

Highgate School and Unley High School, both in Adelaide's inner-south, would use both the French National and Australian curriculums.

Reception students at Highgate who take up the French program will initially receive 80 per cent of their lessons in French, before it drops back to 50 per cent from Year 3.

They could then choose to continue the bilingual program at nearby Unley High School.

Published by Foreign Policy, May 18, 2016

Today, Bustan Yafa serves 65 children. Operated under the auspices of a nonprofit organization, the school is envisioned as a haven for Jews and Arabs and celebrates the cultures, religions, and languages of its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian students.

Published by the Evening Standard, May 3, 2016

London's first “all-through” bilingual school, where pupils are taught in a different language depending on the subject, has been officially opened.

Children can start in the nursery of L’Ecole Internationale Franco-Anglaise (EIFA) at the age of 18 months and stay at the school till they are 18 years old.

Published by the Economist, April 23, 2016

Gaelic is making a comeback in Scotland!

Published by the Buenos Aires Herald, April 13, 2016

The continued advantages of “bilingual” English and Spanish language skills were on display at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires yesterday, which hosted a special event with the Cambridge English Language Assessment body, highlighting the ongoing potential for English language education in Argentina.

British Diplomats at the Embassy building praised the organization’s “excellence” in language assessment and advocated that the event’s theme — “On the road to Bilingualism” — is crucial in the current global environment.

“We all know that we live in a world that is every day more and more globalized and interconnected, and so it’s increasingly important to know more about our languages, whether that be in the realm of professional, educational or personal life,” a British embassy representative told a packed audience at the Embassy in Recoleta neighbourhood yesterday.

Published by Global News, March 8, 2016

The Winnipeg School Division (WSD) Board of Trustees has approved a plan to introduce three new bilingual language programs to its division – Spanish, Cree and Ojibwe.

The Board required a certain amount of students to register for the programs in order to move ahead with the plan.

“We’re very pleased to be offering these bilingual language programs in our division,” said Winnipeg School Division Chair Mark Wasyliw.
“I commend the community members who have worked so hard to get these heritage languages in place.”

The new bilingual language program start at Kindergarten with each year adding the next grade.

Published by SBS, April 7, 2016

This story is part of a five-part series about bilingualism and language education in Australia It‘s Tuesday morning at the Italian Bilingual School in the Sydney suburb of Meadowbank and 11-year-old Sam Evans is giving a presentation about Spain to a small class of Year 6 students.

Published by the Irish Times, March 7, 2016

Ireland’s efforts to build a globalised economy are unsustainable in the long run, given its failed foreign language education policy, particularly in German, according to Irish business leaders and academics.

Heads of multinational companies operating in Ireland say they cannot understand why they are forced to go outside the state to recruit the thousands of multilingual staff they need.

Employers organisation Ibec, meanwhile, said Ireland’s foreign language failure was “the most intractable of policy challenges” that was hobbling growth potential of both home-grown companies and of the Irish economy.

Published by the Austin Statesman, October 29, 2016

The Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative, developed by President Barack Obama to help Latin American and Caribbean entrepreneurs, launched its first fellowship earlier this month and Austin is among the host cities.

The goal of the program is to empower entrepreneurs to advance their ideas and projects by connecting them with businesses and civil society organizations across the U.S. One of 250 fellows chosen this year, Esther Vargas, co-founder of an eco-friendly bilingual school in Nicaragua, is spending four weeks with the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Published by the Bangkok Post, October 2, 2016

Ban Lada is one of 16 schools in the four southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat, Pattani and Satun which are trialling "mother tongue first bilingual education", a pilot project conducted by Mahidol University.

LOST FOR WORDS:

Rohkiyoh Abu and her daughter, Afifa. Ms Rohkiyoh hopes that her daughter won't face the challenges she had with learning Thai. PHOTOS: Chumporn Sangvilert
The programme allows Malay-speaking students to learn to read and write first in Malay as a bridge to bilingual literacy.

Thailand's public schools use Thai as the language of instruction since it is used in gross national literacy measurements.

There is no exception for the southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where the Patani Malay dialect is spoken.

The same policy applies in other regions where dialects are spoken.

But unlike the South, they share a similar cultural and linguistic background to people in central Thailand.

Patani Malay, known by Thais as Yawi and colloquially as Jawi, is similar to Malaysian and uses a written script which is a combination of Arabic and Roman (or Rumi).

Educated Muslim parents can tutor their children at home or send them to private schools which conduct lessons in Patani Malay.

Some send their children to pondoks, traditional boarding religious schools where Malay is used and Islamic studies constitute the only curriculum.

However, the Thai-only formal education system does not work well in communities that use ethnic languages.

"The students should learn from their mother tongue to fully receive knowledge," said Suwilai Premsrirat, project director of Patani Malay-Thai Bilingual Education at Mahidol University, who led a research team on bilingual education nine years ago.

Isra Sarntisart, a programme director of the Thailand Research Fund, added, "The Thai-only formal education has also caused the decline in the use of ethnic languages in Thailand."

The aim now is to get Thai Malays to master the Thai language while allowing them to embrace their own. There are several ethnic dialects spoken in different parts of the country, including Miabri in Phrae province and So, or Thavung, in Sakon Nakhon province.

The Thailand Research Fund has sponsored Mahidol University to design the "orthography" for diverse ethnic groups, including Malay-speaking students, so that they can better understand classroom teaching via their own tongue. Orthography is the systematic representation of a language's sounds by written script or symbols. In the projects Mahidol is developing, Thai script is used as the basis to develop the "sound" of the ethnic languages being spoken.

"The results of the students who graduated from bilingual programmes shows the positive result that the students could better interact in the classroom," Ms Suwilai said.

"In the past, some students dared not ask to go to the toilet because they could only seek permission to go out of the classroom in Malay."

The programme received the Unesco King Sejong Literacy Prize 2016 last month as part of International Literacy Day. Ms Suwilai went to Paris to receive the award.

MOTHER TONGUE

Wanna Udomsartsakul, the principal of Ban Lada School, said that the communities surrounding the school are low-income. Some are chilli farmers, while others work low-paid jobs in the city.


BILINGUAL THINKING: Suwilai Premsrirat, project director from Mahidol University.
"When they are at home, they speak Malay. Some parents cannot speak Thai. So when the students come to school and we ask them to speak in Thai, it is not easy."

Published by the CSUF News Service,  May 9, 2016

Education faculty members hold a "train the trainer" workshop for a group of volunteers who plan to travel to the Middle East this summer to help Syrian refugee children.

Published by Murcia Today, April 20, 2016

Murcia Schools Introduce More Bilingual Education Programs

Published by Gulfnews, April 13, 2016

Being able to speak two languages has become a minimal expectation for parents in the UAE.

The immediate target is to teach children at least Arabic and English, and seek out the best ways to do this.

By the time children are eight months old, those raised in bilingual homes seem to have skills not possessed by those raised in monolingual homes. Research demonstrates that learning a second language can significantly enhance literacy skills development.

Published by SBS, April 7, 2017

This story is part of a five-part series about bilingualism and language education in Australia The chair of Indigenous linguistics at ANU University has called for a national strategy to improve Indigenous language education in schools as poor rates of attendance and performance continue to plague communities.

Published by +972 Magazine, March 11, 2016

Hundreds of Jewish and Arab parents and children from Jaffa protested in central Tel Aviv Friday morning to demand that the city provide them with an option to study in an integrated, bilingual school that treats both languages, cultures and the three monotheistic religions equally.

The parents claim that the arrangement being offered to them by the city is not actually equal and does not satisfy their needs.

There are only seven integrated, bilingual schools in all of Israel.