Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 22nd Feb. UNESCO on Wednesday called on all countries to pursue a policy of multilingual education as it marked the International Mother Language Day.
The agency said that it’s key to fighting the current global learning crisis, have produced positive results in the past.
According to a study by the UNESCO, children are more likely to start reading earlier when they are taught in their mother tongue during the earliest school years.
Proof can be found across Africa. The continent has the world’s highest linguistic diversity, but only one in five children are taught their mother tongue, it said.
UNESCO said that Mozambique expanded bilingual learning to a quarter of its schools, and children are already performing around 15 per cent better in basic reading and mathematics.
It stressed that people communicate in more than 6,700 languages around the world, 40 per cent of them are threatened with extinction in the long term, due to falling numbers of speakers.
