Getting to English through the mother-tongue

Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) hosted its twenty-first Lahore Policy Exchange talk on Getting to English through the mother-tongue. It is obvious that language skills have a strong bearing on student outcomes as well as the ability to think critically. Most countries, as is the case with Pakistan, engage with a language landscape characterized by a multiplicity of local languages, a national language and a high level of social demand for English. When it comes to the choice of language for education, English is often counter-posed to the rest. But is this choice a zero-sum game? Or is it more a matter of deciding on which language(s) to adopt at what stage of schooling as a subject or Medium of Instruction (MoI), for optimizing language learning as well as learning across subjects.