For the past two years, the Jharkhand government has been running a mother tongue based multilingual teaching program in across 259 selected schools of six districts of the State namely Gumla, Simdega, Lohardaga, Khunti, West Singhbhum and Sahibganj.
With the implementation of this program positive results have been seen in the learning of children at the primary level. Encouraged by this, the State government has decided to start the multilingual education program 'Palash' in five local languages - Santhali, Mundari, Ho, Kurukh and Kharia in collaboration with UNICEF and LLF (Language Learning Foundation) in as many as 1041 selected schools in seven districts of the State including Latehar, Simdega, Lohardaga, Khunti, West Singhbhum, Sahibganj and Dumka from the year 2024-25.
The main objective of this program is to achieve the goals of teaching basic education and numeracy along with Hindi by including the mother tongue of the children in their formal education to improve their basic learning skills.
As a part of the State government's plan to expand this program to 1000 schools from the academic session 2024- 25, a linguistic survey was also conducted in two phases in primary and upper primary schools of eight tribal language dominated districts. The districts included were Dumka, Gumla, Khunti, Lohardaga, West Singhbhum, Sahibganj, Simdega and Latehar. The data related to the language of students and teachers was collected and verified by the cluster resource persons (CRP) related to the schools.
After the linguistic survey, the selected schools have been coordinated by representatives of LLF and UNICEF. The distance of the school from the block and district headquarters and other training facilities have been closely monitored by the employees of the institutions. A State Resource Group has also been formed for the successful operation of this program and 32 teachers from eight districts have been included in it. Members of the State Resource Group will timely train and endorse teachers associated with multilingual education of selected schools.
After receiving State level training, members of the State Resource Group will train the selected teachers of selected schools for multilingual education program in their respective districts. District level training will be conducted in five periods and will conclude on August 21, 2024.
Under the multilingual teaching program, there will be mandatory class operation of 90 minutes in selected schools. In this, work will be done on oral language development, decoding, reading and writing according to the balanced language teaching method. Teaching material will be created in the mother tongue of the children and it will be compiled with context familiar to the children and their culture. For this exercise books have been prepared on the vowels, consonants and punctuations of the mother tongue and have also been aligned with the text books of the State.
In this, periodic assessment of children will also be done twice a year which will be different from weekly assessment. After every assessment, eight to ten days will be fixed for remedial teaching work and special classes will be given by teachers to students who perform poorly.
