[lg policy] Pakistan facing language 'crisis' in schools

Wed Dec 8 15:13:19 UTC 2010

Pakistan facing language 'crisis' in schools

Study of education system claims dominance of Urdu and English is a
barrier to effective schooling for all but a linguistic elite and
threatens to undermine social cohesion

    * Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 7 December 2010 14.01 GMT

Pakistan's commitment to using Urdu as the medium of instruction in
its state schools and its ambition to widen access to English language
teaching are creating barriers to effective education, limiting
economic mobility and undermining social cohesion.

These are the stark warnings made in a report on the current state of
Pakistan's schools published last month by the British Council and
debated by academics and policy makers in a series of public meetings
across the country.

The report, Teaching and learning in Pakistan: the role of language in
education, sets out proposals that, if implemented, would seek to
raise the status of the country's main regional languages, lower
barriers to higher-paid government jobs and help to strengthen ties
between language groups at a time when political instability is
straining national unity.

The report's author, British academic Hywel Coleman, who is an
honorary research fellow at the University of Leeds, argues that
action must be taken urgently.

Pakistan is an economically divided society with 60% of its population
living on less than $2 a day and more than a quarter of national
income in the hands of the top 10%. Yet a language policy for schools,
inherited from the British empire, is undermining the effectiveness of
state education and excluding many of the poorest from skills and
training that could help them break out of poverty.

The report's key proposal is to provide teaching to students in the
language they are most familiar with and, for the first time, reflect
Pakistan's multilingual identity in classrooms. There are more than 70
languages spoken in Pakistan, yet Urdu, the national language and the
medium of instruction in the majority of state schools, is spoken by
just 7% of the population.

Children learning in Urdu as a second language face major obstacles,
particularly in their early years, Coleman says, which can range from
slower progress in reading and writing to lack of support from parents
who also struggle with Urdu.

The report urges Pakistan's government to make schooling available in
seven major regional languages, including Urdu, which would extend the
delivery of first-language teaching to up to 85% of the population.

Coleman draws on global research into the impact of home language
education on children's attainment to argue that the policy could
improve enrollments and help to boost attendance by girls. In
Pakistan, just 60% of children compete primary school and only 10%
finish secondary school, while 59% of girls attend primary school
compared to 73% of boys.

Coleman also proposes a realignment of English in the curriculum.
English remains the preserve of the country's elite minority who are
educated privately in English-medium schools and who can make an easy
transition into English-medium higher education and higher-paid
government jobs that require English-language qualifications.

Current government strategy seeks to widen access to this English-only
social strata by improving the quality of English teaching in state
schools. Yet the provision of effective teaching and materials has
been uneven, with the result that the majority of learners are failing
to make even basic progress in English.

Coleman's alternative model is to provide early-years education in
students' regional languages, with Urdu taught as a second language in
primary school. English would be taught from the age of 10, with the
option to introduce English-medium teaching later in secondary school.

Coleman says his "wish list" for education reform has been positively
received inside Pakistan. He is now in the process of analysing
feedback before presenting his final proposals next April.

Fakhruddin Akhunzada is assistant director of the Forum for Language
Initiatives, a local NGO that works with minority language speakers in
the north of Pakistan to develop first-language education. While FLI's
initial projects are small, he says that results have been positive,
and so far 70 students have received their education in their first
language.

But FLI's experience shows that it will be difficult to change
entrenched attitudes about language status.

"People from most of these minor language communities are facing a
kind of social stigma that their mother tongue is symbol of
backwardness. They hesitate to use it and many believe that education
in the mother tongue is inferior to education in Urdu or English. But
our studies of pilot projects suggest that positive attitudes towards
the mother tongue have been gaining ground over the past few years,"
Akhunzada said.

Coleman believes that fundamental change will be necessary to raise
the status of regional languages and give equality of access to
opportunity. "That will be the biggest hurdle because it will directly
challenge the privilege that some sectors of Pakistan society have
enjoyed," he said.

"At the moment, in order to gain access to the civil service and
higher education you need to have a qualification in English. One of
my suggestions is that people should have to demonstrate competence
not only in English but also in Urdu and one of the other main
regional languages. If that were to happen you would find that the
elite private schools would start teaching other regional languages.
Something like that would put the three languages on a more equal
footing."

Coleman hopes that pressure for change will come from international
donors. Since 2002 the US has given $640m to improve education in
Pakistan, with a further $7.5bn in civilian aid due over next five
years. But at a recent conference, organised by Unesco in Bangkok, to
assess progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals for
education, Coleman says there was little prospect of a shift in policy
to support first language education.

"Pakistan is an urgent case. There was frustration at the conference
that a lot of the international donors are not yet listening and are
not aware of the relationship between languages in education and
long-term implications for social cohesion," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/07/pakistan-schools-language-crisis-lotbiniere/print

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