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Language lessons

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It's midday and about a dozen young students are sitting at old wooden desks in a makeshift classroom in the Kham Mountains in Yunnan province. The students are focused on a burgundy and saffron-clad Tibetan monk pointing to Tibetan words on a rough blackboard.

Such scenes are rare in Tibetan areas in southern China, where only a few private schools teach Tibetan children to read and speak their mother tongue or learn about their culture.

Katarina Tomasevski, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, last month in a special report criticised China's education of minority children, saying that the system denied these students their religious and linguistic identity.

Ms Tomasevski, who visited China last September, expressed particular concern about the survival of minority languages in China, quoting a Unesco report which found that out of the more than 120 languages spoken in China, half were endangered.

Polls conducted among minorities in China show that parents ideally want their children to be bilingual. The problem is that no one has come up with a way to achieve both goals. Conventional wisdom says that it's important for students to maintain their native languages.

'There are many studies that say mother tongue instruction can enhance the cognitive skills of students,' says Maki Hayashikawa, an education expert working for Unesco.

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