Patani Malay in Thai education
The Patani Malay–Thai Bilingual Education is an action-participatory research project in schools near the southern border of Thailand. The objective is to provide an effective and suitable teaching and learning approach for Malay-speaking children by developing their cognitive skills as well as their ability to use Thai as a language of learning by initially using local language and cultural knowledge and then transferring their ability to the study of Thai. Communities, academics and other stakeholders are actively involved in every stage of the working process, especially in the development of the orthography, curriculum, lesson planning, instructional material production and teaching within the framework of bilingual education, using child-centered principles. The project shows very positive results.