This year the International Day of Mother Tongue is going to be observed on February 21 to draw the attention of the world community and educators to the importance of early education in mother tongue and home language of children.
On this occasion, I reproduced my article published in slideshare earlier.
“We need to respect linguistic and cultural diversity among children in the schools, and in a sensitive way, develop early intervention programmes at least of 30 odd hours for transition from home language to school language for normal children and attend to language deficits of children with special needs. There is dire need to recognize importance of development of visual or sight language for children with speech deficits and children with learning disabilities since their mediums and styles are learning are entirely different,” said this scribe who works as a researcher in a special school – Disha: A Resource Centre for Multiple Disabilities - when asked to react to the advocacy for “Safeguarding Linguistic Diversity” adding that about 80 per cent of children seeking admission in special school are found deficit in language development.
He concluded that schools need to strive to ‘make home language learning an early intervention for language development of children’ in the age group 3-8 years and then carry out a transition intervention to the standard language.
Some of the articulated thoughts of the UN and its agencies in this regard are as follows.
Dissemination of mother tongue serves rightfully to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education
Globally 40 per cent of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand
Mother tongue-based multilingual education...is importance, particularly in early schooling...(with) more commitment to its development
Multilingual and multicultural societies exist through their languages which transmit and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures in a sustainable way.
Since most cultures are rich in visual communication, so ahead of the observance, an intervention of learning of language with cultural linkage to Holi festival has been for children with special needs at Disha.
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