Local ‘English’

I NOTE the concern of various experts on language and culture (FT 1/3) as well as the BLV that mother languages are being lost because so many children today are speaking ‘English’.

Well, if it were indeed the case that more children were speaking English, wouldn’t that mean that exam results would go up? After all, education is almost exclusively offered and assessed in English. Yet experts agree that the standard of English is going down, not up, and has been for many years.

The answer is simple. We need to distinguish between standard English and Fiji Pidgin English; it is the latter that our children (and adults) are speaking, and knowledge of it does not yield any educational benefits. Those unfortunate children who speak it and have no knowledge of their mother tongue are so because their parents, also speakers of Pidgin, decided that they would make good teachers of English, evidently unaware that to become a good teacher of any language requires extraordinary talent and years of tertiary education.

Nothing we can do will remove Pidgin English, it is here to stay since it serves as a lingua franca, along with our other two pidgins, Pidgin Fijian and Pidgin Fiji Hindi. But to improve the standard of our children’s vernacular and English, we must stop punishing children for speaking their native languages; stop expecting unqualified people to be models of good English — teachers of maths, science and every other subject, parents, and even schoolmates; and stop expecting children to start learning a foreign language at the age of five (or even younger as the fad for pre-schools continues).

If we encourage vernacular literacy in primary school and use mother tongues as media of instruction, and leave the teaching of English to highly-trained teachers in secondary schools, both the standard of English and the general standard of education will improve.

PAUL GERAGHTY

USP, Suva