aide-et-action – Lai Chau, December 9th, 2016 – Aide et Action Vietnam and its partner CISDOMA, has launched an initiative on the supplementary materials in Mong and Vietnamese languages for preschool and primary school (5 years old – 8 years old) in Tam Duong district, Lai Chau province. The Mother-Tongue Bilingual Based Education (MTBBE) approach uses Mong as the bilingual language of instruction, along with Vietnamese.

The materials cover 5 topics: gender equality, life skills, disaster preparedness, child rights, local culture and customs which will be mainstreamed into the daily classes at school. The development of the supplementary bilingual material is one of the key activities of the project “Promoting inclusive and relevant early childhood care and education for ethnic minority and disadvantaged children in Vietnam,” funded by the European Union, aiming at helping ethnic minority children overcomes the language barrier and enabling them to read and write in their mother tongue to preserve their culture first, and then transfer these skills to learning Vietnamese.