It is in the 7th month of pregnancy that the human ear begins to function. During this period, unborn infants respond to all types of noise. They can tell speech sounds from non-speech sounds and in the womb, they are more sensitive to their own native languages than foreign ones. Most fascinating is that they make a well-defined distinction between their mother’s voices and others (Saxton, 2017). That is why home language is referred to as the ‘mother tongue’ because it all starts in the womb.
This is according to Deputy Director-General (DDG) for Special Projects at the Department of Basic Education (DBE), Dr Naledi Mbude-Mehana, as she describes the importance of Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education (MTbBE).
In 2025, the DBE aims to incrementally rollout MTbBE at least up to the end of primary school (Grade 7) in all the nine provinces. MTBBE was launched on International Mother Language Day, 21 February 2024, in the Eastern Cape Province where the pilot on MTbBE was implemented. The province’s education department has made notable progress in ensuring that IsiXhosa and Sesotho – the two predominantly spoken African languages in the province – are used as Languages of Teaching, Learning and assessment (LoLTA) in MTbBE schools beyond the Foundation Phase.
“We will be preparing the system in 2024, for implementation in 2025 and beyond. We want to promote African languages and make sure that parity of esteem for African Languages is achieved for better educational outcomes as stated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996 and the Language in Education Policy (LiEP, 1997) provide a framework and guidelines necessary to promote and implement effective multilingual education practices,” the department said in a statement.
Dr Mbude-Mehana believes that the issue of language has always been at the centre of discussions around academic outcomes. This is what she had to say when asked why:
“Science shows us the progressive development from the 7th month of pregnancy when children distinguish sounds is phenomenal. This phenomenon is one of the many natural occurrences that supports the claim that the mother tongue of the child is a gift to the child that schooling must use to educate that child. When women experience more movement when they are pregnant as they speak, it is because at that moment, the unborn can distinguish their own mother and that is why after they are born, babies are placed on top of the mother to make that connection. The linkage is registered in the brain. From that point on to when they start with babbling at 7 months, babies that are Italian speaking will babble in Italian those who are Sesotho speaking will babble in Sesotho and so forth, because they have heard that sound in the 7th month of pregnancy. Why then do we take away the linguistic reservoir that nature gave them?
Why is language so important?
We want to equalize the playing fields because right now, the only children in the system that have mother tongue education from cradle to university, are English and Afrikaans native speakers in this country. For the majority of African language speaking children, that development and that progression comes to a halt at Grade 3 as they transition to English. From that point, we see that progressive decline, we see a high drop-out rate because research studies locally and internationally, have proved that it takes 6 to 8 years for a child’s language to develop from the time they start school. This makes a huge difference to Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) that is learnt by 3 years of age and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) that is learnt at school. Children must learn in, from and through their language for a minimum of 6 years while they acquire other languages, before they transition to learning in another language. We have confused language transition and linguistic transfer.
Why is it important to keep instilling the importance of languages in children?
When we take away the process that started at 7 months of pregnancy, you take away a whole phase of your child’s life because whatever has been deposited by the environment of the child is what they need as a basis for their literacy learning,
That is why developed countries, don’t teach their child in a language they don’t understand. It slows their development. The importance of ensuring that we put language at the centre of development of a child is because of the progression from grade to grade, particularly if the model of bi/multilingual education is strong.
What historical evidence proves the importance of language development?
History tells us that in 1652 when Jan van Riebeck and the Dutch arrived in South Africa, they spoke Dutch because they came from Holland. As years went by, the language got mixed with the Khoi and San indigenous languages plus languages spoken at the Cape colony at that time to form a new variation/amalgam that we now know as Afrikaans. It was a language for both slaves and masters and grew. The Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) propelled the development of Afrikaans.
The breakthrough for Afrikaans came in 1909 when an agreement between the White groups was reached that Afrikaans was recognized as a daughter of Dutch. The value of mother tongue education was a concept they understood from the mother countries. From 1925, it became an official language.
sThe development of Afrikaans was intentional although it suffered humiliation from the English quarters as a ‘kombuis taal’ a kitchen language. It was seen in writing and there were various forms and varieties of it. Afrikaans represented a new hope for those whose identity was linked to it.
In 1953, UNESCO released a report which stated it is important that the mother tongue of children is maintained for at least 3 years. In 1961 Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language.
“We can successfully, without even using international research make the claim and the statement that we have seen how mother tongue-based education propels people in terms of their development because with the Afrikaaner, it did exactly that.”
What is needed in order to make it work?
There are 4 important implementation strands to language development:
- Status planning. When a government or people in power decree which languages are for education, we call that status planning because the status of the language becomes used for high status functions. There is a vast difference in terms of language development between what we call basic interpersonal communication skills and cognitive academic language proficiency. That is taught in school. Ways of speaking mathematically, ways of speaking scientifically, that is taught at school. The importance of developing language is so that you can use them for high status functions, is a function of language policy and learning. Status learning, decrees which languages are official and they are given a status, for courts, for schooling, for business, for government and for all other high-status functions
- Corpus planning. It has to do with the terminology and it is the development and process that requires a particular register that is used when you teach that language. So, if you don’t use African languages to teach mathematics and science, they will always remain under developed as nothing forces you to register that language in basic and higher education.
- Acquisition planning is ensuring teacher planning and teacher development. What becomes important is how languages are taught and how they are learnt and how they are used as medium of instruction. For this, we will work with universities.
Prestige planning speaks to the value of that language. Nobody will have a reason to learn it if they don’t get anything from it. When you plan for the prestige of a language, you intentionally do advocacy for it.