Parents must fight for home languages
In a multilingual society, moving away from a monolingual education system is imperative
Why do parents keep choosing English over their own home languages and why are they so unwilling to challenge this false choice? They are maintaining an untenable aspect of our education system … when, in fact, under our constitution, they have the power to transform it to everyone’s advantage.
It is not that they find the current language regime acceptable. Throughout the country, it is an ongoing source of parental anxiety and dissonance. Children cannot achieve at their best in any subject when they have not yet mastered the language of learning and teaching. By the time their language starts to catch up, they have missed out on basic concepts.
Yandiswa Xhakaza of Nal’ibali, in her article in the Mail & Guardian “Children left speechless, denied identity” (25 September to 2 October 2020), touches on raw nerves when she points out the fears of falling behind, and the painful issues of identity associated with language loss. Language and its links to family and culture should be a source of pride, not of fear and embarrassment.
The parents’ drive for English and their seeking out of better schools, which are inevitably English medium, are perfectly rational, as well as being reinforced over decades in which African languages have been suppressed and their extraordinary value overlooked. Parents’ reluctance to challenge the system also makes good sense because they have been led to believe that there are no other options.
The choice in grade 1 is simply between English- only or homelanguage- only as the classroom medium, neither of which can be adequate in a multilingual country with a constitution that demands equity in education and an economy that requires our learners to be achieving at a much higher level.
But giving parents this choice means that officials can keep blaming parents for maintaining the status quo and the government can gloss over the glaring gaps and allow the situation to continue. This is despite its disastrous effects on educational performance, particularly in relation to early-grade reading, and its psychological and cultural damage as the years progress.
Actually, the choice applies only to the first three years of schooling. By far the majority of learners face English-only from grade 4 onwards, ready or not (with plenty of research to show that it is not possible for most of them to be ready). The monolingual English system that follows is not even based on our national language in education policy of 1997, it is merely a practice assumed to be the most practical and cost-effective. A comparison with a multilingual system, in which the current costs of failure are factored in, has never been conducted.
No parent can ignore the need for proficiency in English for a child’s future in South Africa and for the efficient functioning of our economy. But this does not mean having to use English as the only medium, or that simply using it will result in the proficiency needed for learners to reach their potential (for the majority, it will not). Such proficiency requires excellent teaching of English as a subject by English specialists — an issue that is taken seriously only in some of our best schools.
All monolingual communities need the option of bilingual education based on their local language. However, in our multilingual areas (expanding all the time through urbanisation) all learners need:
To use a common medium in multilingual classrooms (at least from grade 3 onwards). We cannot build a cohesive country with children separated into apartheid-style, monolingual schools;
To use their own language to supplement the common medium in the process of learning all subjects; and To learn their own language properly as an additional language subject.
Such a system needs: The introduction of multilingual methodology into our classrooms, moving away from our one-classroom, one-language practice and including the use of bilingual text materials; and
A district system of language specialists for teaching a spread of languages as subjects, and not just the language of the school’s majority.
Over the last 10 years, various multilingual methods have been tried from grade 1 to university level and shown to be effective (especially in the teaching of mathematics) but none has received the kind of government support necessary for mainstream piloting.
In fact, the system is geared to shut down any significant attempts at innovation. The idea of mobile language specialists to teach all our languages as subjects was raised by the department of basic education in its draft of the interim introduction to African languages policy in 2013, but it has never been followed up.
Nonprofit organisation Nal’ibali has confronted the task of building bilingual literacy for all our children by making bilingual reading materials freely available (in English and eight of our languages, including Afrikaans, with the other two to follow when funding can be raised) for learners from grade R through primary school. Nal’ibali is also creating awareness among parents of the implications of language loss and the critical importance of speaking and reading to children in their home languages, at home. This is how English and home language proficiency can be developed at the same time. But parent action now also needs to take on our school system.
Current government-supported research is merely tinkering with ways to improve learner performance within the current English monolingual framework. What is necessary is serious research and development aimed at real innovation to meet the current and future language needs of our multilingual society. Only parent pressure can make that happen.