Planning for Language Use in Education

This document was designed as a practical response to requests from USAID’s Africa Missions, which have increasingly indicated their need for more guidance on the role of language of instruction (LOI) in their efforts to achieve Goal 1 of the 2011 USAID education strategy: Improved reading skills for 100 million children in primary grades (USAID, 2011). This document is intended to serve as a summary of key research findings and best practices relevant to USAID’s and other stakeholders’ programming efforts with respect to language use in education, and as a resource for putting the evidence and lessons learned into practice.