Mother-tongue-based bilingual or multilingual education in the early years

To help inform policy guidelines, this report concludes with preliminary recommendations for policy guidelines, including key elements and a suggested outline. Highlights of the recommendations are to: carry out awareness raising campaigns on the importance of the development and use of mother tongue-based instruction ; support the critical role of governments in promoting effective mother tongue-based bi/multilingual education programmes ; promote clear, sustained political commitments to bi/multilingual education in policy frame works and administrative contexts at national and local levels ; encourage mother tongue development to the level of cognitive academic language proficiency to scaffold additional language learning ; recognize mother tongue acquisition, rather than acquisition of a dominant national or international langue, as the first priority in judging children’s achievement in preschool and throughout primary school…