Teach in first language, it’s the key to success
Congratulations to the Class of 2017 and their teachers for the job well done. To those who failed we say: failure is not fatal, rather it is the courage to continue that counts.
The results came at a time when we were still licking the wounds inflicted by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) 2016 report. According to the report, eight out of 10 children in grade 4 cannot read for meaning. South Africa scored last in reading out of the 50 countries assessed. This failure could seriously hamper the children’s performance when they get to matric.
It is tragic that most of the pupils who performed badly in the Pirls study wrote their tests in their mother tongue. We know that children learn through language, especially the one they understand, which is their mother tongue. If they begin school in a language they know well, the language they speak at home, they can understand what is being taught, and can learn to read and write.
In its 1953 report, The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, the Unesco Committee of Experts affirmed the centrality of mother-tongue instruction. But, when Unesco published the report, it was commonly thought, if children could have mother-tongue literacy and education for the first few years of school (one to three years) while also learning the international language of wider communication (ILWC) as a subject, they would develop sufficiently strong literacy skills to be able to switch from their mother tongue to the second-language medium by about grade 3 or 4.
Further research has shown us, by the end of the third year of school, most children in well-resourced African settings would have only a small fraction of the language skills in the ILWC/second language (in our case, English) that they need for learning across the curriculum. Most importantly, they would also not have mastered their first language to be able to master their subject matter.
The developmental process necessary for the high level of cognitive language proficiency required for successful learning throughout the school curriculum takes longer than most people expect.
The development of the type of literacy necessary for reading and writing about science, history and geography, or understanding problems in mathematics, becomes increasingly complex and difficult from the fourth year of school onwards.
This is the case for most…
