Preparing me for Class One (my first day at St John’s School in a village called Tutuka, at Obuasi – Adansi, in the Gold Coast era) my grandmother gave me a piece of advice which has lived with me to this day.
She said in Fanti: Sé ekc skull na eka Fantse a, ka ma ne ho ntsew, na obiara nhu dé ifi fie. To wit: Whenever there’s the occasion in school to speak Fanti, speak it with such clarity and grace that everyone will know you come from a good home.
That was Grandma Aba Yaba’s instinctive emphasis of the umbilical magic sourced from the heart and soul of a mother to preserve the child’s confidence.
She inferred the following also: As you play and make friends, be respectful and open-minded enough to learn to speak the languages they speak: If they speak Twi, learn it. If they speak Ewe, learn it. If they speak Hausa, learn that as well. She ended her homily as follows: And, learn English from your teachers. You will need that also for the future.
In addition to her other travails in the community, Grandma delivered pregnant women who trooped to her doorstep of babies, for free. She herself never set a holy foot in a school for midwifery or education; but her uncanny, untutored instinct to discern that kids were capable of limitless learning was remarkable. [My first daughter, now at Harvard Graduate School of Education, was named after her].
Children’s innate ability to learn new things is a cognitive mystery of nature. I recall being with some elementary school pupils in the Middle East some years back. In addition to Arabic, the kids spoke English, French, Armenian and Spanish. If, as they say, we use only a small fraction of our brain power, that example is a replica of our great human potential.
In the School of Education in the United States, my most profound teaching experiences hinged on the three things children needed foremost to excel: One, a physical environment to assure their personal safety and health; Two, a positive emotional environment to induce and secure their confidence; and Three, an appropriate instructional environment with competent strategies and resources to foster quality teaching and learning. With those fitting conditions intact, every subject and their cousins can be learned.
It happens that, cognitively speaking, a key aspect of the emotional environment to secure learners’ confidence centres on the mother tongue, or the first language. In class one, we first learned to explore reading and writing through Twi, a language we spoke well. We began with the Akan primer, “Fie Ne Skuul”. By upper primary, not only could we write in Twi, we could read the “Nkwantabisa” newspaper.
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 port of call. It is from here that they transit to everything else. An advantage we have in Ghana is that the various languages and dialects generally use the common English alphabets. The learning of English itself was eased through the sound and spelling structures sourced from the Akan: there’s a method to appreciating all languages including one’s very own.
An article by Yaw A. Ankomah, affiliated with UNESCO, (“Literacy in mother tongue: Necessary foundation for learning languages”, Daily Graphic, Nov 14, 2014) was timely in affirming that: “Basic literacy involves having knowledge in basic aspects of language such as speech sounds (phonology), spelling patterns (orthography), patterns of word formation (morphology), grammar (syntax), and word meanings (semantics).”
While admitting challenges in heterogeneous classrooms - with a mix of various first languages, he still advocated “a literacy revolution” through the creation of a literate environment in a people’s own language, “the language in which they think and are able to freely express their thoughts and ideas.”
To be effective, literacy in one’s own language must go beyond the mere ability to speak it. Proper literacy entails communication through the ability to write letters for correspondence, read books, and – in these brave new days – blog, post on the Internet, and use the social media.
It follows then that Ghana must be poised to support literacy campaigns in the indigenous languages through what the Ministry of Education / GES calls the National Literacy Acceleration Programme (NALAP).
A person must be able to read, write and speak English to be fully literate in English. It follows then, that for modern communication purposes, a person who can only speak a language but can neither read nor write it - whatever the first language is - by modern standards - is not fully literate in that language. 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.
Iconic educators such as J. Kwabena Nketia, J.A. Annobil, C.A. Akrofi, F.L. Bartels, and Ephraim Amu – and churches such as Presbyterian, and Methodist - have long advocated literacy in Ghanaian languages. In the end, it is not a question of preferring English or a mother tongue; we need both, and more if you include French with which one can communicate with the neighbours in Togo, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire.
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