The Mother Tongue Mind

The Mother Tongue Mind

Many children in South-Africa and across the globe are unable to speak or to even understand their mother tongue. This is because of all the hype that exists around English. A lot of parents believe it would be wiser to send their child to an only English school, hoping that it would help them further in life. Many schools also do not offer schooling in the child's mother tongue, either because they do not have the resources or the child's home language is not widely spoken in that area and is being oppressed by another, bigger language.

But few know the great loss children suffer if not taught in their mother tongue as long as possible. 

Wait, what?

The hard fact is that these kids are losing their chance of performing well at school. They are thrown into a system of language turmoil without as much as a straw to grasp on. In the most cases, their entire school career is a fight to keep their head above water.

A study was conducted on 3 groups of students. One group had no mother tongue schooling, another had 3 years and another had 6 years mother tongue schooling. Not surprisingly, the group who had 6 years of mother tongue schooling showed the best results and the “straight for English” group, the worst. This is because students develop Cognitive Language Academic Proficiency (CALP) in their first 6 years at school. One cannot develop CALP unless you have Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) BICS in the language.

You cannot deny studies like this show that mother tongue education is a MUST.

A lot of these students then feel that their mother tongue “has done nothing for them” and thus stop speaking it, or simply “to fit in”. These children will start lose their ethnic identity and culture by adopted that of English. You can easily see how this can also lead to a communication gap in the parental house as a lot of the parents do not speak English. How would you feel if you can’t communicate efficiently with your parents, and on top of that, you cannot even communicate efficiently in English? Pretty lost I imagine.

“Let us teach our children to love themselves and their heritage first before we introduce them to the languages and cultures of other people.”

Now what?

  It is time we as South-Africans, and general population of the world, realize the importance of mother tongue education. I believe mother tongue education should not just stop at school, but should be implemented in universities as well. How silly does it seem to equate intelligence to proficiency in English?