A mother that is better educated is also better able to raise her children. When she has access to learning when she's young, she'll be less likely to contract HIV, less likely to be subject to violence and more likely to earn higher wages and take better care of her family. Giving girls books now empowers future mothers.
SIL LEAD is proud to now be an affiliate member of the Basic Education Coalition (BEC), a network of organizations committed to equal access to high quality basic education. By collecting and sharing member perspectives, expertise, and experience, this network provides an opportunity to engage in actions that give all children the chance to learn.
BEC members seek to realize the goals set forth at the World Education Forum held in 2000. These six goals, now internationally recognized as Education for All (EFA), represent an established initiative to meet the learning needs of children by 2015. EFA aims to “ensure that all children receive an education that enriches their lives, expands their opportunities, and empowers them to participate in society.”
You can find more information about the Basic Education Coalition on their website at www.basiced.org.
Being a part of a network that pursues quality education is certainly encouraging as SIL LEAD promotes mother tongue education, which helps young students understand their lessons and stay in school longer. We look forward to discovering more ways of partnering with organizations that help children everywhere unlock the power of learning.
Paul Frank presenting the Kom Education Pilot Project on International Literacy Day in Washington, DC.
In celebration 0f International Literacy Day on September 7, USAID hosted over 650 people to celebrate the important role that literacy plays in development.
In collaboration with the Global Partnership for Education, the Brookings Institution and Lions Club International, as well as World Vision and AusAID, the event was full of energy as new innovations were presented and 32 awards were given as a part of the Grand Challenge, a grant competition that will allow new projects in literacy and education reach millions of people in the developing world.
Paul Frank participated as part of a panel discussion on reading instruction and presented findings on the impact of a mother tongue-based multilingual education pilot program with the Kom, a language community in Northwest Cameroon. Representing SIL LEAD and SIL International, Paul explained multilingual education and the significance that projects like this one have in demonstrating the relevance of multilingual instruction.
The Kom Education Pilot Project is just one of many indicators of the success of a transitional multilingual education model. Findings from the Kom project demonstrated that after just one year of schooling using Kom, the mother tongue of the children in the classroom, students had higher overall test scores than the students in the schools that were using English as the language of instruction. In addition, students from the Kom education program consistently outperformed their peers in Reading, Math, and Oral English.
After several years, the students in the Kom-medium schools continued to outperform their peers in the control schools. The use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction has brought significant improvements in learning outcomes, especially in grades 1-3. The children in the experimental schools show stronger reading comprehension, oral proficiency, and general lexical knowledge in English. This advantage persists for at least two years after Kom-medium instruction has ended. The children in the Kom-medium schools actually performed better in English than the children in the English-medium schools, and that advantage persists after at least two years following the end of the intervention.
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