Jakarta - The Education Ministry said the use of indigenous languages during a pilot project for teachers instructing students in informal schools had been conducted with some success.
Dendy Sugono, the Ministry‘s language center director, told a forum here Monday the pilot project had included illiterate adults and had focused on reading and writing in Bahasa Indonesia.
He said the project had shown students could more easily learn to read and write in Indonesian if classroom teachings were conducted in their "mother tongue".
The illiteracy rate in Indonesia was sitting at 7.2 percent, or some 11 million people in 2007.
The government has aimed to reduce this figure by three million people in 2009, in line with the United Nation‘s Millennium Development Goals to eradicate illiteracy by 2015.
"We are running a pilot project in Subang, Banten, which sees adults learn Indonesian in Sundanese," Dendy said.
The forum was co-organized by the ministry, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the embassies of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. The event was in line with International Mother Tongue Day, which falls every Feb. 21.
The use of indigenous languages as a mean of instruction was initiated by UNESCO, which also aims to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity in education and to face the threat of local language extinction.
Dendy said the use of local languages as a mean of instruction, however, was faced with challenges because of the limited vocabularies of those languages.
"We have 746 indigenous languages and only very few are well developed with enough vocabulary to express what we mean," he said.
Despite the difficulties, Dendy said the ministry planned to expand the program to formal schools in provinces in the future.
He said mother tongues were in danger of extinction in some areas because they failed to interest the younger generation.
"We want our students to appreciate indigenous languages and master them better," he said.
Speaking at the same forum, Sabbir Ahmed, an assistant professor at the University of Dhaka, said a Bangladesh NGO had developed a similar program that involved local languages in classroom teachings.
The program was introduced by Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), which has accommodated 14,289 indigenous students.
Bangladesh has some 45 ethnic groups that speak different languages and in 2006 the country‘s illiteracy rate stood at 37 percent, or around 54 million people.
Ahmed said the use of indigenous languages in classroom instruction was not only intended to smooth the learning process but also to boost the self-esteem of indigenous people.
"We want indigenous children to be at ease when they express themselves in the classroom," Ahmed said.
"While they might feel inhibited toward using the national language, Bangli, they can choose to speak in their own mother tongues."
Source: www.thejakartapost.com (26 Februari 2008)
