Think Creative - Issue 7

Education Strategy Bilingual

A big win for learners in Mozambique 

By Leopoldino Jerónimo. Photos by Erick Gibson

A new 10-year national Bilingual Education Strategy that sets out a plan for all teachers across the country to be proficient in teaching bilingual education classes by the end of 2029 is under review by Mozambique’s Council of Ministers. The strategy is the result of a successful pilot phase of bilingual education, which showed improvements in relations between teach- ers and students and in the children’s school performance. Although limited in scope, the pilot demonstrated that bilingual education is successful in delivering literacy and numeracy skills to early grade children in the Mozambi- can context. Four main areas have been defined to reach the strategy’s goals by 2029: provision of school material; initial and in-service teacher training; mastering the transition model from native language to secondary language for instruction; and community mobilization. In a country where more than 40 languages are used and where most people are not native speakers of the national language, Portuguese, bilingual education is critical to student suc- cess, education experts say. With only 10 percent of Mozambican children able to speak Portuguese when they begin school, this new bilingual initiative has the potential to extend education opportunities

The Let’s Read! program’s essence is the focus of the pending national strategy. Training teachers in bilingual education and producing teaching and learning materials in so many languages requires resources that have not been available until now. Some of the main challenges have included the training and con- tinuous professional development of teachers, provision of school supplies — especially books — and the regulation, pace and sustainability of expansion. Let’s Read! is the largest bilingual education expansion in the country to date. Operating in 13 Emakhuwa-speaking districts in Nampula and eight Elomwe- and Echuwabo-speaking districts in Zambézia province, the program has reached over 1,950 schools, 7,000 teachers and 400,000 students. Let’s Read! designed intensive teacher training courses and developed teaching and learning materials through an integrated and inclusive process by the Ministry. The program’s efforts to expand bilingual edu- cation include the standardization of national languages’ orthography, an instrument to guide those developing learning materials, and the teacher training program. By creating common ground, Let’s Read! and its partners engineered the building blocks to scale up their efforts nationwide. n

and increase student comprehension and performance for thousands of students. Failing to understand instruction, many learners leave primary school before graduating, and many of those who do complete primary school are unable to read and write well. Portuguese continues to be the language of instruction in most Mozambican schools, but efforts from the local government and educa- tion partners are transforming this practice. Going further with bilingual education The strategy was created with support from the USAID Vamos Ler !/Let’s Read! program in response to the Ministry of Education and Human Development’s mandate to improve education quality and reduce the illiteracy rate inMozambique. The strategy is a significant achievement that responds to the major needs of the country.  “USAID Let’s Read! continues to support Mozambique’s Ministry of Education and Hu- man Development in its expansion of the new Bilingual Education Strategy, which respects and promotes local languages and cultures,” says programChief of Party Leesa Kaplan. “Students learn better and faster in a language they can understand, and parents and commu- nities can be more involved in school and their children’s education.”

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