Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education?: Conversations with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Jim Cummins, Ajit Mohanty and Stephen Bahry about the Iranian ... Diversity and Language Rights, 15) - Hardcover

Kalan, Amir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783096179 ISBN 13: 9781783096176

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

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.

(Colin Baker, Bangor University, UK)

A unique and compelling book, offering an impassioned plea by Iranian scholar Kalan for multilingual education in his own country. In conversation with four international lifetime warriors for the rights of children to education in their own language, the author probes the gamut of contentious political, historical, linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, and practical arguments against mother-tongue-based multilingual education, demolishing them one by one.

(Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, USA)

About this edition

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1783096179
• ISBN 13: 9781783096176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176