The Future of Education

Experience demonstrated that an education particularly in early years which begins in the mother tongue and builds competence in the second language before using it as the medium of instruction, thus reducing the linguistic and cultural barriers faced by students when entering school, is a key component in increasing the educational attainment of speakers of minority languages.

In a research on Performance of Mother Tongue and Bangla Users in Ethnic Schools of BRAC and Relevent Issues’ conducted by Prof. Mesbah Kamal, Abdul Haque and Zobaida Nasreen in 2004 clearly showed that the performance of the students using mother tongue as the medium of instruction is significantly better than the performance of the second language users.

Although access to schools has increased and enrolment rates also improved, the dropout rates are still alarmingly high and achievement levels are low compared to their non-ethnic counterparts. One of the reasons for this is that education is conducted in non-mother tongue along with a different cultural context which they do not understand.

In order to address these challenges BRAC Education Programme (BEP) launched Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) Chakma programme in 2008. The main purpose is to assist children from ethnic community to bridge the linguistic gap using the student’s native languages as the medium of teaching in early grades and become proficient in Bangla through bridging by their own language.

This programme was piloted first in 10 multilingual schools for Chakma children in the south-east part of Bangladesh to reaching the children. The students of the schools completed Primary Education Completion Examination (PECE) with historical success compare to other ethnic students. Presently more than 1,000 Chakma students have been studying in BRAC MTB-MLE Chakma schools. Bilingual texts and supplementary reading materials have been developed from pre-primary to Grade V to improve their quality education in Chakma language.

Keywords: linguistic and cultural barriers, minority languages, second language users, Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), bridging, quality education;