A tale of two languages : The mother tongue and English
About to start a pre-service teacher training in a school district in the Western Region, I encountered a situation that confirmed clearly the need to start teaching children - particularly those in the deprived communities – in the comfort of their mother tongue, or in the first language.
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As I entered this particular class of about seven or eight year olds, I witnessed a timid, insecure bunch of children cuddling uneasily, sitting all alone - without a teacher. The timidity got worse when I asked in English, “Where’s your teacher?” I realised that not one could answer such simple question that many take for granted.
In changing the mood, I asked in Fanti: Hom nho tsen den? (How are you). The whole class erupted into a loud, buzzling chorus: Hého ye! (We are fine). After that, things were never quite the same again.
The timidity simply evaporated as we engaged in Fanti where everyone was enthused to make a contribution, weaving their own bits and pieces of reality into a conversation - and to be validated as clever by both the adult and their own mates. Before that encounter was over, I had sneaked into the conversation some basic English where the children could now say, in chorus, “My teacher is ill”; “My teacher is home”; “My teacher is absent today”, and so on.
[That experience has lived with me to this day, reflecting my own humble beginnings in the mid-1950s in a village in the Adansi area, where we were taught the symbols and sounds of the alphabets, enabling us to begin reading and writing in both Twi and English, from class one.]
It happened that there are advantages in homogeneous classes where children spoke a common local language be in Fanti, Twi, etc. But other teacher training sessions in the Nkwanta North and South Districts yielded a different case. Here was a heterogeneous community where both pupils and teachers spoke various languages including Adele, Atsode, Nthrobo, Challa, Ewe, Konkonba, Kotokoli, Basari, and Twi. How then does one begin? It happened that the English language offered the vehicle to knit those schools together, including even religion where a morning training session began with a Christian prayer and ended with a Muslim prayer, or vice versa.
Rev. Balmer
I’m often reminded of Rev W.T. Balmer who arrived in Cape Coast as the new headmaster of Mfantsipim School (1904 – 1911). He saw as a defect “the neglect of the natural medium of instruction, the native tongue.”
For the new head, the commitment was not to teach his pupils to be grand Europeans but rather to be great Africans. He said, “Those who would lead Africa to a worthy life, and mode of expressing that life, must find some positive spiritual principle.” When the Reverend cautioned the indigenes not “to sin against the spirit within”, he wasn’t talking about the Ten Commandments. He was intimating that there was but one cause of human failure, and that was the lack of faith in one’s true self.
A (UNESCO) report, Mother Tongue Matters: Local language as a Key to Effective Learning [ED – 2007/WS/56 Ren], focused on Mali, Papa New Guinea, Peru, and the United States and suggested the need for teaching in the mother tongue, from the following:
1. The “increasing awareness of the value of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity” and the danger of many of the world’s languages disappearing in the coming decades.
2. Another has to do “with the commitment of the world’s nations to the goals of Education for All [EFA]” and to include an “expanded educational opportunity for marginalised and underserved groups.”
3. The third concern is that parents wonder why “they are investing so heavily in an education that yields no employment; teachers spend their careers attempting to communicate knowledge in an international language to students who cannot assimilate it’, and where “rural areas despair of ever improving the natural standing of their schools when most students fail final examinations.”
Mother tongue as first port of call
For children with little or no access to the English language – especially in the rural areas – the mother tongue or a first language is the first transit port of call. While there are clear challenges in heterogeneous classrooms – with a mix of various first languages - a literate environment in one’s own language helps people to think and express their ideas freely.
To be effective, literacy in one’s own language must go beyond the mere ability to speak it. Proper literacy entails communications with the ability to write letters, read books, and - with the Internet - blog, send and receive emails, and use the social media as a bonus.
The double trouble is where a good number of our school leavers cannot read or write in English, and can neither read nor write in an indigenous language. In the end, it is not a question of preferring English or a mother tongue; we need both, and more by including French with which to communicate with our neighbours in Togo, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire.
Teaching the lower age groups properly – in both the mother tongue and English - demands highly competent skills. It is here that children form the foundations on which to build confidence for lifelong learning and fulfilment. And yet perhaps – out of ignorance or indolence – we tend to take the lower levels for granted in Ghana. In Finland, for example, it is more difficult to get into their schools of education – to teach the very young - than into medical or engineering schools.
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