Mother Tongue Education: Prioritizing Cognitive Development
How multilingual education may prove the solution to a century of curricula favoring memorization over the cognitive development of its pupils.
It may appear self-evident that children succeed at higher rates when they are taught in the language they know; but worldwide, education initiatives have often prioritized the languages of commerce and colonialism over nurturing the understanding of their students. Thanks to UN-funded research dating back over fifty years, there is substantial proof that students experience higher testing scores, higher levels of understanding, repeat fewer grades, and stay in school longer when the first six to eight years of their schooling are taught in the language that they speak at home.
Still, the majority of schools around the globe offer education only in the given country’s dominant language or the language of a former colonial power — even though many students may not have heard these languages before their first day of school. In most cases, students do not have access to resources on language learning outside of the classroom and are simultaneously required to become familiar with an entirely new language while learning the basic tools of reading and writing. This model of education has been called “submersion” because it resembles a “sink or swim” approach to teaching — asking students to either swim by learning the new language, or sink and drop out.
Mother Tongue Education and Cognitive Development
Fundamentally, the importance of mother tongue education is a matter of cognitive development. To achieve literacy, students must understand the words that they are being asked to read and write. In a classroom where students are asked to learn to read at the same time as they are asked to learn a new language, they face the immense challenge of associating written representations of letters with words that they do not yet associate with any real meaning. This approach burdens students with learning two incredibly complex concepts at the same time, and thus results in a much lower success rate than would otherwise be achieved in a multilingual classroom.
Even for students who are able to advance in this environment, success comes at the expense of deeper cognitive development. In submersion classrooms, students learn to read in the new language through a practice of memorization, where they may recognize that the written word “apple,” for example, means something in English without truly knowing what that meaning is. This process favors mechanical thinking rather than promoting the deeper, and more resonant, understanding of what it means to represent one’s thoughts as text written on a page. As a 2004 UNESCO study found, “submersion programs may succeed in teaching students to decode words in the [dominant language], but it can take years before they discover meaning in what they are ‘reading.’”
To better account for the cognitive development of students, UNESCO has recommended that schools located in areas with populations who do not speak a country’s dominant language adopt a bilingual teaching model. In this approach, classes are taught in a community’s mother tongue during the early years of primary school so that students can fully learn to read and write, and be introduced to early mathematical concepts and other academic subjects, in the language they speak at home. Once students have demonstrated proficiency in these areas, then a second language can be introduced successfully and become the means of later instruction. Essentially, students can learn two languages at once, and thus be bilingual in their homes, or learn a language later on; but it is detrimental to their development to ask them to simultaneously learn a new language and learn fundamental concepts such as literacy and early mathematics.
The benefits do not stop at literacy, however: UNESCO has found that students express themselves with a greater degree of confidence and creativity when their mother tongues are recognized as a legitimate means of communication in the classroom. As a result, students emerge from school much more likely to establish themselves as both leaders in their own community as well as their country at large. They are even more likely to achieve a higher level of socioeconomic status than their peers educated in submersion programs, all without being asked to reject or set aside the cultural identities of their families or home.
For all of its benefits, however, bilingualism is often not the best solution. Some bilingual models continue to perpetuate the problems of submersion education by focusing on transition from the mother tongue to a more dominant or commercially popular language. This approach undervalues the mother tongues of its students even as it employs them. In other cases, consideration of multiple languages is needed for the success of all students — particularly in areas where students themselves grow up in households that speak more than one tongue.
To address the needs of the world’s increasingly diverse populations, multilingual approaches, as well as translanguagism, are being developed, though research is still ongoing about best practices for these initiatives. The hope is that, when applied, all students — whether migrants or minority populations — will find their languages represented in some aspect of the classroom on a daily basis.
Africa: the Origin and Development of Mother Tongue Education
Mother tongue education was first studied and practiced in Africa. From the first days that missionary schools populated the continent in the 19th century, the question of language efficacy has been raised in coordination with European studies of the continent. Missionaries found it necessary to transcribe their own versions of African languages so as to understand their potential flocks — and often used that understanding when designing the curricula that they presented at their schools. As early as the 1950s, UNESCO released a study concluding that teaching in a population’s mother tongue yielded the best results; but facing pressures from a world where English was the language of commerce, and success in a given country often depended upon an individual learning the language of the colonizer, many countries favored submersion methods over multilingual approaches to education.
Since its enactment in 1997, South Africa’s difficulties in implementing a multilingual education policy call attention to the way in which government-led attempts to administer mother tongue education often fail when they do not give sufficient power or independence to local teachers and leaders.
Attempts to standardize learning methodologies across diverse linguistic landscapes have created problems in mother tongue education programs since the days of missionary work. When European missionaries first began to establish schools and churches in the African continent, they approached language learning with the biases and assumptions of their 19th and 20th century contexts. These individuals were citizens of countries which had standardized their languages, where those in power had defined what exactly they believed constituted the most “pure” and “correct” form of English or French, for example, as part of the nationalizing project of the nineteenth century; and as a result, missionaries often came to Africa assuming that all languages should have a standardized, fixed form. This assumption led many to transcribe regional dialects as if they were the ‘true’ version of a given language, and not just one way of speaking it; and, as a result, many mother tongue education curricula were based on false or obsolete versions of local dialects. In some cases, these gaps in understanding went uncorrected for decades, and continue to be reinforced and institutionalized up until today. When left unchecked, these policies have yielded systems where, for example, the Xhosa that is taught in South African classrooms has little resemblance to the Xhosa that is spoken in the average student’s home.
Ethiopia’s implementation of mother tongue education has suggested a strong relationship between the involvement of local authorities and the success of education initiatives. Ethiopia instituted nation-wide mother tongue education in 1994 and also eliminated fees for all state-run schools. Though cutting school fees clearly increased the number of students who attended school, the benefits stemming from the shift to mother tongue education were more debatable. After the implementation of this program, when taken as an average across the country, some researchers believed that the gains of mother tongue education were small: average literacy rates were not broadly improved, and students only stayed in school for an average of 0.7 years longer than they did before the policy change. Other policymakers maintained that mother tongue education dramatically increased student retention rates in areas where communities fully embraced the switch and did not feel pressure to still use English as the dominant language in the classroom.
In a quest to understand why mother tongue education seemed to have a questionable effect in Ethiopia, researchers began to break down the data by region. They identified a trend: graduation and attrition rates in Ethiopia were influenced by geography. Schools further away from the capital city of Addis Ababa experienced higher rates of student achievement; and those closer to the government’s capital experienced higher rates of attrition.
The research found that this inverse relationship between proximity to governmental power and student success proved the importance of having local communities lead the education of their children. In regions closer to Ethiopia’s capital city, government officials were more likely to be in control and local stakeholders were less likely to exert influence over curriculum and school practices — and student success rates suffered as a result. In contrast, in areas more remote from governmental influence, local stakeholders were empowered to be involved and, in these situations, the students were more likely to do well and stay in school longer.
The successes and failures of mother tongue education in Africa are as diverse and varied as the linguistic environment of the continent itself. However, some patterns remain clear: particularly, that when implemented by outsiders, even mother tongue education can perpetuate the problems of submersion programs. When given to well-trained educators who are fluent in the concerns and language of a locality, these initiatives help students to thrive both at home and in the classroom.
The Philippines: An Ongoing Case Study in Top-Down Implementation
Galvanized by successes from individual schools within its borders, the government of the Philippines began implementing mother tongue education across the entire country as of the 2012–2013 school year. The Philippines’s new Mother Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy called for the use of local mother tongues as the language of instruction from kindergarten to year 3 before introducing the country’s official languages (Tagalog and English) as the primary modes of instruction starting in year 4. In an attempt to overcome the problems with a standardized, government-mandated policy of mother tongue education, policymakers in the Philippines have worked to build a holistic understanding of the language needs of each region and apply this understanding to an analysis of the methodologies which have succeeded in independent schools in the country to date. The hope is to achieve a flexible and tailored version of standardized policy, one which can be implemented by a single governmental agency while still taking into consideration and addressing the various needs of different localities.
The Philippines may be the only country in Southeast Asia to have instituted this type of national policy; but mother tongue education has long proven successful in community-based schools throughout Southeast Asia. This is particularly true in Thailand and Cambodia, where UNESCO and CARE have strong ties with community-run schools and provide teacher training and support. In Cambodia, schools teaching Tampuan have given communities the resources to build literacy programs in both their Indigenous tongue and in Khmer, the official language of Cambodia; and as a result, a new generation of students are graduating with the means to enter the economy and civil service jobs while still remaining connected with their home communities. Ting Sain, a teacher who was illiterate until he enrolled into an adult education class that used mother-tongue education, emphasizes the importance of preserving Tampuan identity: with only 31,000 remaining Tampuan speakers in Cambodia, he told UNESCO that mother tongue education “[is] also important for the children because it keeps the language and culture. They learn to read and write in their own language.” Sain argues that this combination has allowed his students to build the confidence and skill needed to speak for their community on the national level.
Local-Driven Education: A Cheaper and More Successful Approach
One of the greatest advantages of mother tongue education is that it does not demand high amounts of funding or large-scale centralized infrastructure. In fact, it can often be implemented at little cost in terms of materials: when local speakers are tasked with writing curricula, and local printing companies are used to produce teaching materials, the costs have again and again proven to be miniscule. In Africa, investment in mother tongue education programs requires less than 2% of a country’s budget, an investment which is often recovered within 5 years. Through the Rivers Readers Project, communities in Nigeria proved more than capable of appointing local speakers to write successful curricula and providing their own funds for developing language materials, ultimately producing over 40 educational publications in 15 languages. In Papua New Guinea, communities decide which languages will be used in their schools; and a study conducted in Chiapas echoed findings in Africa saying that local teachers, when given adequate opportunities for training and resources, are in the best position to help students succeed.
“Mother tongue education offers us the miraculous”
In a world facing overwhelming injustices caused by systemic inequality, it often seems impossible to point to a single change that could improve the prospects for local communities and the next generation of children worldwide. Yet mother tongue education offers us the miraculous: a solution which comes at little cost yet holds the potential to encourage an entire generation of children to embrace their local identity while also taking part in the broader economic and political framework of our world today.
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