Mother tongue education is not a new issue in South Africa. From the Soweto student uprising on 16 June 1976 to the current language debates occurring on university campuses all over South Africa, students have been fighting to be educated in their mother tongues for decades. While many of the current debates centre around tertiary education, mother tongue education is an issue that is rooted in the very beginning of education, which starts in Grade 1.
Let's have a look at the current situation. The NSC (National Senior Certificate) exams that are written at the end of Matric are available only in English and Afrikaans, even though there are nine other official languages. This is the case for two reasons. Firstly, it is practically impossible in the current South African situation to provide eleven exam papers for each subject (excluding the language subjects). Secondly, Afrikaans and English are the only official languages with sufficiently developed academic vocabularies. Because the NSC exams can only be written in English and Afrikaans, it seems pointless to educate a child in any other language. This, together with the impression that English is a highly esteemed language, results in “straight to English” education, in which parents in families who do not necessarily speak English at home send their children to English schools from Grade 1.
There are various problems with this approach. Until they go to school, they have most likely never spoken English before. They, therefore, have not developed BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) in English before they attempt to develop CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) in English. This is problematic because it is impossible to properly develop CALP in a language until BICS has already been developed in that language. Furthermore, in many communities the teachers, like the learners, are not mother-tongue speakers of English. This results in the learners learning second or third language English, which further disadvantages them. Often, the learners even abandon their mother tongue in favour of English, resulting in monolingual first language English speakers who speak English as though it is their second or third language. Statistics show that this has a hugely negative effect on the academic success of these students.
Mother tongue education is therefore something that is sorely needed in this country. Studies have shown that learners perform better when they are taught in their mother tongue and while many students are taught in their mother tongue until Grade 3, they are taught in English after that and students need at least six years of mother tongue education in order for it to be truly beneficial. Therefore, children should be taught in their mother tongue for the first six years of school, during which they are also taught English as a subject to make the transition from mother tongue to English as smooth as possible. This will raise a generation of bilingual or even multilingual students who will not be held back by being less than proficient in the language of their education.