Understanding Trilingual Education Reform in Kazakhstan: Why Is It Stalled?
Trilingual education is an ambitious national plan in Kazakhstan which promotes the use of three languages: Kazakh as the state language, Russian as the language of interethnic communication, and English as the language of integration into the global econ
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Understanding Trilingual Education Reform in Kazakhstan: Why Is It Stalled? Laura Karabassova
3.1 Introduction Kazakhstan is the first country in Central Asia and the Post-Soviet context to introduce using three languages as a medium of instruction for different curriculum subjects as part of an ambitious national language-in-education policy. Trilingual education is the major educational reform in Kazakhstan embracing all levels of education, from preschool through graduate studies. That being said, the reform mainly affected secondary education and has become the most controversial and vague educational policy. Indeed, trilingualism is an agenda discussed by a wide range of stakeholders, including educators, parents, policy makers, and social activists. While the concepts of trilingualism or of the Trinity of Languages itself, initiated by the first President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, initially received a warm welcome and were accepted with enthusiasm, it met much resistance and criticism when it came to implementing it on a large scale. Half-baked policy implementation mechanisms accompanied by distortions and misinterpretations at each level have made trilingualism a highly controversial issue in Kazakhstan. The teaching of three languages, Kazakh, Russian, and English, as language arts had been no stranger to Kazakhstan, but the new policy of trilingualism called for using these three languages simultaneously as languages of instruction to teach different subjects, e.g., history, biology, or physics. To pilot this new initiative, in 2007 the Government designated 33 mainstream Kazakhstani schools as trilingual and referred to them as “Daryn” schools. Teaching through the medium of two languages (Kazakh and English) had long been practiced in the network of BIL1 under
BIL: Bilim-Innovation Lyceums, former Kazakh-Turkish Lyceums (KTL)
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L. Karabassova (*) Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Egéa (ed.), Education in Central Asia, Education, Equity, Economy 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50127-3_3
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the KATEV (Kazakh Turkish Egitim Vakt) foundation, prior to the launching of the trilingual education reform. In 2008, to depart from the existing educational practices, to test a new model of trilingual education and translate their experience to the rest of the schools in Kazakhstan, the Government, under the Autonomous Educational Organization (AEO) Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS), established a network of 20 Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools. The NIS adopted a model of trilingual schooling which stipulated using Kazakh and Russian for instruction in grades 7–10 and teaching most subjects through English in the senior years (Karabassova 2018b). Moreover, in 2017, to implement English as a medium of instruction in the Kazakhstani mainstream schools, the Ministry of Education and Science (Mo
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