16/8/2016 0 Comments Divided by terminologyAn article in the Fiji Times today reports on an early childhood education conference at which the Permanent Secretary for Education urged the 500 teachers present to use the children’s mother tongue to teach. He cited the Global Education Monitoring report ‘If you don’t understand, how can you learn?’ and explained that the use of an unfamiliar language in the classroom acts as a barrier to learning.
Towards the end of the article, we read “But ECE Teachers Association president, Ufemia Camaitoga said children should instead be taught in their home language and not necessarily mother tongue.” So what is the difference between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘home language’? From a linguistic point of view, absolutely nothing. More importantly, the Permanent Secretary is using ‘mother tongue’ to mean exactly the same thing that the Teachers Association president means by ‘home language’, but they do not realise this, leading to an unnecessary debate that has distracted from what they were both advocating: teaching children to read, write, count and so on in a language that they already understand. Many people use ‘mother tongue’ to refer to the language spoken in the place to which a child belongs in a traditional sense. So someone born in Suva may be considered to be “from Tailevu” or to “be Rotuman”, but they may or may not speak the language from that island. Their linguistic competence will depend on factors such as the amount of time they have spent on the island, the extent to which their parents use this language at home, and so on. From this perspective, ‘mother tongue’ means something like an ancestral language, or a linguistic identity. At the ECE conference, it appears that Camaitoga takes this perspective, believing that many children do not actually speak their mother tongue. However, another definition of ‘mother tongue’ (more commonly used by linguists although many avoid the term altogether) is simply the language, or languages, used in the home from birth. From this perspective, a Suva-born Rotuman might speak Rotuman as the mother tongue, but she might not. She might speak another language such as English or Fijian as the mother tongue, and it is also quite possible that she speaks two or more languages as the mother tongue if these are spoken fluently around her in her formative years before going to school. This is the perspective that the Permanent Secretary clearly takes, while Camaitoga refers to this language as the ‘home language’. It is a shame that an ECE conference that tackled such an important issue ended with the audience perhaps believing that these two influential figures were on opposing sides. Both are aware of the research evidence that children need to learn through a language that they already understand and speak fluently for at least 6 to 8 years, before they will be ready to start learning through a second language such as English. Fiji’s policy officially advocates learning through the mother tongue (or home language or vernacular) for the first three years of primary school, but it appears that there is wide variation in the extent to which this is followed. If teachers feel that their leaders are divided on the matter, it will be even harder to create the conditions through which children can acquire basic literacy and numeracy effectively through a language they actually understand.
0 Comments
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2019
Categories |