Literacy in multilingual contexts

UIL has mainstreamed the promotion of mother-tongue-based multilingual education within its major programmes (CONFINTEA, LIFE and Priority Region Africa) as a guiding principle for Education for All and lifelong learning.

Since 1953, UNESCO has recognised the challenges inherent in adapting education systems to the complex realities of plurilingual and pluricultural societies in such a way as to provide high-quality education that both values linguistic and cultural diversity and creates social cohesion.

Decades of international dialogue and agreements speak in favour of systems of mother-tongue-based multilingual education. In a multilingual environment, the aim of the education system should be to enable learners to become highly proficient in their mother tongue and in other national and/or international languages. The mother tongue is interpreted to mean the language or one of the languages that the learner masters and uses in her/his immediate environment and daily interactions. It is also the language that “nurtures” a child during his or her first four years of life and whose grammar he/she has learned before starting school.

UIL has systematically integrated the promotion of mother-tongue-based multilingual education into its major programmes such as CONFINTEA, LIFE and Priority Africa, considering it to be an important principle of education for all and lifelong learning.

In the context of LIFE, UIL and its partners – the Institute of Popular Education, the Ministry of Secondary Education, Higher Education and Research of Niger, Nirantar and SIL – are currently developing an action-research manual for the promotion of adult literacy in multilingual contexts.