Mother-tongue education among Bangladeshi children in Swansea: an exploration

Abstract

This paper draws on the authors' personal experience of teaching mother-tongue (Bengali) to the Bangladeshi children in Swansea in an extra-curricular class organised by the Bangladeshi community. It provides an inside view of the classroom; the problems and practice of Bengali teaching therein; and an insight into the perspectives and attitudes of the students, teachers and parents towards mother-tongue education. Of late, these issues have been of major interest in the field of mother-tongue teaching in Britain.