With regard to Patrick Hilbert?s interview with Professor Vina Ballgobin (l?express, vendredi 19 novembre 2004, p. 7). As a professor of bilingualism and bilingual education at Stockholm University on a visit to Mauritius, I was interested to read of Professor Ballgobin?s concerns regarding the use of Kreol in primary schooling. I had an opportunity to discuss some of these very issues with Professor Ballgobin when she attended a public lecture I was invited to give in Mauritius on 6 November on Implementing Bilingual Education. Now I am writing to fill in some missing pieces for your readers and to present an alternative view:

1. Language is an extremely important factor in addressing inequalities in a schooling system. Social, economic, ethnic and other differences between students are reduced when the mother tongue, that is the language that the student speaks and understands best, is used as the medium of teaching and learning, at least in the early years. Mother tongue-based bilingual education means starting with the learner?s knowledge and experiences,developing reading, writing and thinking skills in the home language while teaching the second language as a subject. Exposure to the second language gradually increases without sacrificing first language literacy and cognition. If time is taken to construct second language skills based on first language ones, the result is high-level bilingualism and biliteracy,and only then do learners reap the benefits Professor Ballgobin makes reference to - cognitive flexibility and ease in learning additional languages.

2. Granted there is a greal deal of research from North America and Europe,but the past 20 years have seen an increase in language-in-education studies from post-colonial countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While the contexts are diverse, the basic pedagogical principles are the same, in particular the positive transfer of reading, writing and thinking skills from the first language to the second, as best explained by Dr Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto. These principles have been validated by programs like the Six-Year Yoruba Medium Primary Project in Nigeria and PEBI/PEIB in Peru and Bolivia. Comparisons can be made, because countries with more complex ethnolinguistic situations and fewer human and economic resources than Mauritius have implemented strong mother tongue-based schooling programs - take the cases of Guatemala, Papua New Guinea or Cameroon. The example of Sweden is also useful because it is a small country that successfully uses a non-international language (Swedish) as a medium of instruction from pre-primary through university doctoral studies, but has achieved high-level Swedish/English bilingualism by teaching English as a subject beginning at grade 3. The principle once again: students can develop high-level competence in a second language if it is based on strong mother tongue development.

3. Introduction of Kreol into the Mauritian schooling system will be facilitated by a number of positive conditions that do not exist in other countries, namely: agreement among stakeholders on a proposed unification of existing Kreol orthographies (which did not differ significantly on many points to begin with); 30 years of experience with adult literacy in Kreol; a diverse range of Kreol literature for children and adults, including stories, poetry, non-fiction, and translations; use of Kreol for pre-literacy and literacy activities at the preschool level; dictionaries, descriptive grammars and more. As Dr Neville Alexander and his colleagues at the University of Cape Town have demonstrated, development of a language in written form (in their case, isiXhosa) proceeds at exponential rates through its use in schooling, and teachers and trainers are well placed to propose and pilot pedagogical vocabulary as needed. The recent experience of Mozambique provides further evidence, as in the past three years teachers and trainers have developed and put into use materials for grades 1 through 3 in 16 different languages. The advantage of Kreol in Mauritius is that Kreol alone would serve for mother tongue education for about 95 percent of the population.

4. Any improvement in the education system requires an investment, especially for teaching materials and teacher education; however, these should be balanced against the costs of continuing to use a language that prevents children from participating effectively in their own learning. The costs are precisely the high repetition, failure and dropout rates Professor Ballgobin mentions. Recent studies by World Bank researchers have weighed the costs in terms of per-pupil expenditure with the benefits of improved school success in mother tongue-based programs. Using data from Guatemala,

Dr Harry Patrinos and others have shown that the costs of publishing mother tongue materials and training teachers can be recuperated after the first two years of implementing bilingual schooling.

In conclusion, I highly respect Professor Ballgobin?s calls for proper planning and for involvement of parents and communities as well as teachers and pedagogical experts like herself. However, there are plenty of guidelines and strategies available from the international field of bilingual education, and starting with the child?s strongest language is clearly a key to improving educational quality in Mauritius.

Carol BENSON, Ph.D. Stockholm University