“Research shows that children are likely to achieve higher levels of literacy when using a home language in school, in our case, African languages like IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Setswana and others,” said Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga on Tuesday in a speech prepared for delivery at the 10th international language and development conference in Cape Town.
https://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2013/10/15/language-important-for-pupils-motshekga
I was at school with a girl whose Greek parents immigrated to South Africa from Egypt in the early 1960s. They arrived with four young children and very little money. The twins, who were the eldest of the siblings, started Grade 1 unable to speak a word of English. All four children learnt to speak English very quickly and were assimilated into the South African educational system by the time they got to the senior primary school level. They spoke Greek at home to their parents and all four passed matric having passed both English and Afrikaans. Their children in turn have all gone to university and taken up professions. For them, acquiring English was the key to obtaining an education and uplifting themselves from refugee status.
When I was a high schoolteacher I taught many immigrants who arrived speaking little or no English – teenagers from Bosnia, Croatia, the DRC, Taiwan and many other countries. What they had in common was that they had all been educated in their mother tongues during their primary school education. All arrived knowing very little English and were expected to get on with it and assimilate. All of them passed English and Afrikaans in Grade 12. One in particular arrived from Taiwan in Grade 8 and achieved 8 distinctions in matric – including distinctions in Mandarin, English and Afrikaans.
The Canadian government offers French immersion schools and English-speaking parents choose to send their children to these schools where they are instructed in French in all of their subjects. And the children cope – even though their parents can’t assist them with the homework!
So is Angie Motshekga right? Are children who are taught in their mother tongue better equipped to learn in the future? Or do children adapt and pick up languages as a matter of survival? I suppose the important question to ask is whether fluency in English is the key to economic advancement and whether that trumps the benefits of mother-tongue instruction? MacRat