Education Commons^™

Who’S Afraid Of Multilingual Education?, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

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. Using conversations with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Jim Cummins, Ajit Mohanty, and Stephen Bahry, prominent academic experts in linguistic human rights, mother tongue education and bilingual and multilingual education, this book bridges that gap. 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 …