BSC CELEBRATES UN MOTHER TONGUE DAY

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.

 If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”.

Nelson Mandela

The British School in Colombo community constitutes of more than 50 nationalities and as such linguistic diversity is our common heritage. The International Mother Tongue Day is observed to emphasize on the importance of one’s mother tongue and also to celebrate the cultural and linguistic diversity of different regions. At BSC, we celebrated UN Mother Day on 21^st February with assemblies and Form Time Activities across Key Stages. The theme of the 2022 International Mother Language Day was “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities”. Students and teachers discussed the potential role of technology to advance education and ways of supporting the development of quality learning and teaching for all.

A recent UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank and OECD survey on national education responses to COVID-19 school closures of 143 countries showed that 96 per cent of high-income countries provided remote learning through online platforms for at least one education level compared to only 58 per cent of low-income countries. In low-income contexts, the majority of countries reported using broadcast media such as television (83%) and radio (85%) to support continuity of learning. At BSC, we were fortunate to dive into Microsoft Teams to deliver online lessons and overcome many of the barriers in the past two years ensuring equitable and inclusive learning for our students.

The language of our thoughts and our emotions is perhaps one of our most valuable assets. Building genuine dialogue is built around respect for languages and the use of the mother tongue is a powerful tool. Each language conveys cultural heritage that increases our creative diversity. Senior School students have been busy conducting a survey to identify languages spoken in each class and to challenge the minds further, students leant to say ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’ in a minimum of five languages during Form Time.  

The vitality of languages depends on all those who speak them and we encourage everyone to rally round to protect them!