Language of Instruction Transition in Education Systems (LITES)
Funded by: USAID
Project Lead: Pulte Institute
Notre Dame Collaborators: Pulte Institute
Contact: Tom Purekal
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN’S EDUCATION
There is a learning crisis in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) such that large numbers of learners are failing to acquire foundational skills (World Bank, 2018). Less than half of all children in these contexts are able to read a simple story by the time they are 10 years old, with that number reaching 80% of all children in some countries (World Bank, 2020). All learning, in school and at home, occurs through language. Children are often taught content and foundational skills in an unfamiliar language while they are concurrently attempting to learn the language itself. It is no surprise that a child will learn well only in a language they use and understand (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Hoover & Tunmer, 2020). Indeed, recent reviews of evidence on learning in LMICs have underscored that instruction in a child’s first language (L1), or most familiar language, is one of the most significant inputs for consistent learning gains across a variety of programs and contexts (Evans & Acosta, 2020; Nag, et al., 2019). Despite this evidence, an estimated 37% of learners in LMICs are still not taught in the language they use and understand (World Bank, 2021). This suggests that there is still much work to be done to realize effective first language instruction and adding or transitioning to a second language to facilitate learners’ bi-literacy.
While considerable research, advocacy, and practice efforts have focused on expanding home language instruction, much less is understood about how education systems should effectively add or transition instruction from a first language (L1) to a second language (L2) and sometimes additional languages. Language of instruction (LoI) transition has emerged as a prominent concern for policy-makers and development partners in LMICs in recent years. As many LMICs have begun to offer some instruction in learners’ L1 in the early grades, they nonetheless (almost universally) require an eventual shift in the LoI to a regional, national, and/or international L2 at some point in learners’ school experiences (often occurring in grades 3-6) (Trudell, 2016). We refer to this shift in LoI and the multilingual curricular sequence that leads up to this eventual shift in LoI as the LoI transition.
Successfully transitioning from L1-medium learning to L2 learning requires careful attention to a number of learning and contextual factors, including building learners’ language comprehension in the L2 while teaching foundational skills and content knowledge in the more familiar L1. The success of this skill development, in turn, relates to a complex array of inputs, conditions, and processes.
PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY
Apart from the evidence supporting home language or familiar language programs and policies in the early grades, there is limited evidence from LMICs regarding how to design and implement a strong language of instruction transition policy and the various factors that enable or impede the success of these efforts. This LITES study seeks to help fill this knowledge gap by generating empirical evidence regarding factors that contribute to the success of language of instruction transitions for learners’ L2 literacy skills in a cross-country study in Kenya, Mozambique, the Philippines, Senegal, and possibly other countries (including Mali and Zambia). Evidence generated from this study will provide useful insights to bilingual and multilingual education in low-resource settings.
Two LITES study designs
The overall objective of the LITES study is to provide decision makers with information on how to support foundational literacy acquisition in bilingual and multilingual outcomes in upper primary school through policy design and implementation.
To accomplish this, we focus on the factors identified as critical policy and practice levers for an educational system and divide these into two separate, but related and co-implemented, studies.
The first is a qualitative comparative case study design employing causal process tracing as a within-case method. Process tracing is well suited to answer ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions with historical, social, and political phenomena. This qualitative study focuses on education policy and its role in creating school-level conditions conducive to effective multilingual education. This study includes examination of 1) policy prioritization, 2) policy and program implementation, and 3) policy uptake.
The second study design employs quantitative methods and examines the relationship between classroom conditions and student language and literacy skill development as well as the internal cognitive processes and pathways of skills transfer across languages for reading comprehension. This study focuses on two areas: 1) classroom and teacher factors tailored for multilingual literacy acquisition, specifically: teacher competency and attitudes, classroom language environment and usage, and availability and quality of teaching and learning materials; and (2) the cognitive and linguistic processes underpinning successful multilingual literacy acquisition.
Learn more by reading the LITES Brief
