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Education International
Education International

International Mother Language Day promotes bilingual classrooms

published 15 March 2007 updated 15 March 2007

On February 21 International Mother Language Day marked an opportunity to celebrate linguistic diversity and to promote multilingual education worldwide.

On the occasion, UNESCO published a new teacher training strategy report on bilingual teaching for francophone West African countries to encourage the teaching of mother tongues, alongside French in schools there. The report concludes that ‘the sustainable development of African countries in general, and particularly in the Sahel region, necessitates the adoption of a suitable language teaching policy, in other words, a multilingual approach using African languages in the classrooms.’

EI affiliate SNEA-B in Burkina Faso supports the use of maternal languages in teaching and is actively seeking to contribute to the promotion of bilingualism in the Burkinabe education system.

To download the strategy paper from UNESCO (in French), please click here: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001496/149633F.pdf