Whos Afraid of Multilingual Education?
Conversations with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Jim Cummins, Ajit Mohanty and Stephen Bahry about the Iranian Context and Beyond
By (author) Amir Kalan
Publication date:
18 August 2016Publisher
Multilingual MattersDimensions:
234x156mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781783096176
More than 70 languages are spoken in contemporary Iran, yet all governmental correspondence and educational textbooks must be written in Farsi. To date, the Iranian mother tongue debate has remained far from the international scholarly exchanges of ideas about multilingual education. This book bridges that gap using interviews with four prominent academic experts in linguistic human rights, mother tongue education and bilingual and multilingual education. The author examines the arguments for rejecting multilingual education in Iran, and the four interviewees counter those arguments with evidence that mother tongue-based education has resulted in positive outcomes for the speakers of non-dominant language groups and the country itself. It is hoped that this book will engage an international audience with the debate in Iran and show how multilingual education could benefit the country.
Multilingual education has become an important topic of this and the next decade. Amir Kalan has created a book that advances debates and universal ideas about multilingual education. Contextualised in the political, religious and linguistic complexity of Iran, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the importance of multilingual education, in Iran itself, and in listening to four exceptional scholars.