Language and Education Policy in Multilingual Contexts

Millions of children around the world, especially in low- and middle-income countries, begin school learning in a language to which they have had little exposure. Children who learn and are assessed in a language different from that spoken at home or in their community are more likely to drop out of school and demonstrate lower learning outcomes than their peers, on average. Designing multilingual education systems, however, is not always feasible or desirable and requires a different set of resources than monolingual systems. This course explores how multilingual countries and communities design and implement language policies, and the major factors at play when increasing the number of languages used in a school system.