ABSTRACT

Mother tongue-based education has been central to the promotion of early literacy skills in many multilingual contexts of the Global South. However, learners in such environments may face significant linguistic challenges when changing language of instruction during schooling. In particular, the linguistic distance between mother tongue and official language may be a significant barrier to learners. This paper provides an empirical approach to this issue by employing language matching based on linguistic distance between languages to explore changes in literacy scores for learners who change language of instruction. Findings show that the greater the linguistic distance between two languages, the larger the loss in foundational literacy. We conclude that language matching could be introduced as a tool to identify at-risk learners during transitions and, if possible, as a tool for linguistic allocation of students who have the possibility of selecting between schools with different languages for instruction.

摘要

在全球南方的许多多语言环境中，以母语为基础的教育一直是促进早期识字技能的核心。然而，在这种环境中的学习者在学校期间改变教学语言时可能会面临重大的语言挑战。尤其是，母语和官方语言之间的语言距离可能是学习者的一个重大障碍。本文通过采用基于语言之间语言距离的语言匹配来探索改变教学语言的学习者的识字分数变化，从而为该问题提供了一种实证方法。研究结果表明，两种语言之间的语言距离越大，基础读写能力的损失就越大。