Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education?

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.

Amir Kalan is a researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests include multilingual education, multiliteracies, second language writing and multilingual text generation.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education: Legal Frameworks, Theoretical Legacies, and Historical Experiences
A Conversation with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

2. Multilingual Education: Pedagogy, Power, and Identity
A Conversation with Jim Cummins

3. Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education: An Indian Perspective
A Conversation with Ajit Mohanty

4. Multilingual Education in China and Central Asia
A Conversation with Stephen Bahry