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

of the disadvantaged. In contrast, the Indonesian material explicitly focused on equipping the adultlearners with entrepreneurship skills to become competitive in the marketplace. But for these verygross characterizations, it is safe to say that the materials were generally designed to be compatible inperspective with the nationally prescribed material that was available in the mainstream language.Finding teachers to teach mother tongue was also not easy. Invariably, for the non-formal literacyprogrammes, teachers had to be found from among the community members. More often than not,these people possessed minimal academic qualifications and had no pedagogic preparation. Thus,preparation demanded extensive training both in content and transaction methodologies. It was alsonecessary to ensure that the selected teachers were sensitive to the cultural concerns of the minorityethnic groups and felt positively about the value of learning through the mother tongue particularlysince many of the programmes had very limited means (if any) to remunerate the teachers. The Thaiproject, for example, could recruit well-qualified persons, but could not retain them for long within theproject due to the availability of more lucrative and geographically-comfortable jobs being offeredthrough the formal education system.Assessing the ImpactProtagonists of a monolingual national language policy do not accept any real benefit from studyinglearning through mother tongue. This is based on the argument that in any case all children will have toeventually switch over to the common national language for most of their public communication tasks.It is in this context that the pilot studies examined if any special advantages accrued to the individualswho underwent mother tongue learning programmes. In other words, did the pilot projects make anyperceptible difference to the learners? This was not easy to ascertain. The seven pilot studies operated fora relatively short period of time and in widely varying contexts. Though the overall goals of the projectswere similar, they were linked to local contexts of the particular ethnic/linguistic groups. Furthermore,in two cases studies, the learners were young children and it was not easy to assess what and how muchinfluence the early mother tongue literacy learning has had on their development. Keeping these pointsin view, project impacts have been recorded in different ways and with respect to different parameters.This section gives a brief account about the benefits of teaching through mother tongue as observedunder the seven projects.A clear indication was that wherever the experiment was linked to early school years, it had a directimpact on the participation behaviour of children. For instance, the introduction of the Sadri mothertongue literacy programme for the Oraon ethnic group in northwest Bangladesh resulted in significantimprovement with respect to attendance and retention of children in schools. In fact, the dropout rateamong children became negligible with the introduction of mother tongue literacy involving gradedmaterials for Classes I, II and III on literacy, arithmetic, social studies, physical science and English.Simultaneously, the community learning centres established in the project areas helped villagers toacquire, upgrade, and enhance life skills, livelihood and literacy. Preparation of structured materialensured that the effort could be extended to other Sadri-speaking areas. Also, the involvement of localpeople in the development process had a lasting effect on the community, significantly increasing thelikelihood of the effort continuing beyond the life of the project.The Cambodian effort of imparting mother tongue literacy did not remain confined to the Bunongcommunity; even Khmer speakers began to learn Bunong. The Bunongs felt encouraged that their[ 21 ]