Mother Tongue Based – Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) programmes in a broad spectrum of varieties have improved access to education for millions of children, by providing them access to literacy...Show moreMother Tongue Based – Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) programmes in a broad spectrum of varieties have improved access to education for millions of children, by providing them access to literacy in their home languages and ensuring a stable bridge to the official language(s) of a particular country. In Timor-Leste, a country with a complex multilingual situation, children on average need eleven years to complete up to grade 6, drop-out rates are high and levels of listening comprehension in both official languages Tetum and Portuguese are low. Recognizing these issues and aiming to improve the countries’ education system, Timor-Leste recently evaluated an MTB-MLE pilot initiative in twelve schools in three districts. As a newly independent nation with strong foreign influences as well as internal linguistic diversity, positions of different languages within society are still being negotiated with decisions on language in education being able to strengthen or weaken positions of speakers. Although the debate on MTB-MLE in Timor-Leste is about what would be best for children’s education, political motives are involved as well. At this stage between experimentation and implementation, the short term results and practical application of the programme in selected locations are visible, giving an introduction to a story of which the remainder is still subject to imagination. For both those who support and oppose the programme this imagination lies in the application of the programme in Timor-Leste’s rural areas. Challenging and multilingual as they are, they are used as arguments for both success and failure of national implementation. No studies however, connect these arguments to local data and sociolinguistic information about the areas referred to. This study makes a start with that, connecting arguments of both sides to sociolinguistic data of one district, Lautém, and the literature available on multilingual education and Timor-Leste.Show less
