Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education - A Key to Quality Education
Worldwide nearly 7000 languages are spoken today. Many languages are spoken by ethnic minorities who are educationally and economically disadvantaged because of limited language fluency. This language gap must be bridged if countries are to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All aims. More than 200 million children globally live in homes where languages spoken are different than the ones used in school. These children are vulnerable to non enrolment, repetition and non completion.
More information on Multilingual Education in Asia and Pacific: http://www.unesco.org/bangkok/
The International Conference on Language, Education and the Millenium Development Goals, November 2010, Bangkok, Thailand: http://www.seameo.org/LanguageMDGConference2010/
The UN Millenium Development Goals: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/