The tot, her mother tongue and poverty

Our home of three generations of Fraziers is a little “United Nations.” On any day, the grandparents may choose to speak Akan, Ewe or English. For the children, the second generation, Akan and English (with a dose of pidgin) and some corrupted Ewe dominate their communication. The grandchildren who are in the Montessori kindergarten communicate with the parents and among themselves in “Okay English.” As for crawlers their speech world exists in funny cries and jerky gestures pointing to the mouth.

It is 5 a.m. Little Anima, aged four, and Bijay, aged two, who sleep in the same room as their grandmum are shaken awake and dragged with their eyes half-closed with sleep to the washroom. “Wee wee and pooh-pooh, okay. Let me brush your teeth, okay….Let me bath you, okay…Eat your breakfast, okay…” While waiting for their school car, Anima works on her abacus beads and Bijay is absorbed in cartoons on her tablet. “Bye, bye; be good girls, okay,” Grandma waves them off to school.

So with their lunch packs they are driven to school. Here, the medium of instruction and conversation is functional English. But children being sharp-eared in matters of languages, start picking, without instruction, a few words of the mother tongue. Hopefully, by the age of six they will be fluent in Akan and Ewe to complement the language of instruction.

Is there any benefit in starting a child with the official national language (English) and allowing her to pick the others on her own steam? In fact, sometime ago, this had been the official position in the Ghanaian educational system. However, by a series of studies done by UNESCO it has been claimed that a child learns to perform better in any endeavor in life when instructed in her mother tongue. Thus the benefit of starting a child off with “okay English,” has since been questioned. Furthermore, it has been claimed that starting a child off with a foreign language promotes poverty, a theme that has become topical since the visit of the Director of the World Bank, the man with very big ears for listening to poverty matters.

Since it was the Minister of Education, a professor of English Literature and Communication, who ignited this theme, one can suspect that an official government position on the matter of mother language instruction may not be far off. This makes some people to cringe a bit, knowing that there is no shortage of good ideas for governments when they come to power “threatening” changes. Regrettably, most of the changes they introduce simply refuse to bear fruits. This “mother- tongue- to- prosperity” theory may well turn out one such change.

The difficulty in teaching a class in metropolitan Accra made up of little children of Ga, Akan, Ewe and Northern extraction can well be imagined. What might happen would be an imposition of one chosen language over others. The danger here is that the chosen language might not be as linguistically rich as those that might have to be submerged and lost under the chosen one. Already, we see this being subtly done by marketers who advertise their products with hook lines that sometimes sound inexact and woolly.

It is a technological age. Laying a poor base for the language of science, modern technology and business will prove calamitous for development. The appropriate terminology for education purposes may not yet have been developed. As a Ghanaian caller from New York to a BBC programme put it the other day, “How do you state the Pythagoras Theorem in your local dialect?”

The multiplicity of languages may exacerbate the difficulty of providing schooling in each mother tongue. There may be a shortage of educational materials in the language.

In all this, the role of the teacher must not be overlooked. How many Ghanaian teachers have been adequately trained to handle a Chemistry or Physics Class in the mother tongue without watering the subject down to an exercise in gibberish? Has the role of our colleges of education been properly assessed in the scheme of changes? Has it occurred to the proponents that parents and students may resist schooling in the mother tongue?

My view is that if we find the standard of literacy and numeracy falling among pupils and the general population, we may blame it on the lack of rigorous grinding in the subjects of opportunity: travel mathematics, literature in the appropriate language at the lower classes. One may also blame it on lack of creative methods of teaching. The teacher must teach interspersed with quizzes and examinations. A class must be segregated into skills and talents. In a class of 60, there is bound to be a large number of non-performers who will not keep up with the bright ones. They need special attention by a teacher solely dedicated to such pupils. (Perhaps, this might be the strategy for dealing with a multiplicity of mother tongues in a class)

Extremely large class sizes in the name of accessibility only serve to dilute the effectiveness of attention and contact time.

Above all, the educational system must encourage private reading to which credit points must be awarded.

By this piece, it is not being suggested that mother tongue could not be taught; far from it. In fact, for subjects such as History, Culture and Linguistics, the mother tongue should be the medium of instruction. For the rest, the Okay English start- up as currently practised should be maintained. While admitting that miscommunication does result in poorly executed tasks, it being the cause of poverty is far-fetched. If you ask me, the litany of culprits is Lack of attention, teacher absenteeism, frequent strikes; lack of motivation, shortage of teachers and extremely lax supervision in the educational system.

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(Author: Blame not the Darkness; Akora; The Sissain Bridge)