The Ministry of sports and Culture’s Mother tongue promotion programme is a positive pedagogical move. To put it in simple and clear terms, the level of development of children’s mother tongue is a strong predictor of their second language development. Children who come to school with a solid foundation in their mother tongue develop stronger literacy abilities in the second language.When parents and other caregivers (e.g. grandparents) are able to spend time with their children and tell stories or discuss issues with them in a way that develops their mother tongue vocabulary and concepts, children come to school well-prepared to learn the school language and succeed educationally. Children’s knowledge and skills transfer across languages from the mother tongue they have learned in the home to the school language. Transfer across languages can be two-way: when the mother tongue is promoted in school (e.g. in a bilingual education program), the concepts, language, and literacy skills that children are learning in the second language can transfer to the home language. In short, both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children access to both languages.Mother tongue promotion in the school helps develop not only the mother tongue but also children’s abilities in the second language. Bilingualism confers linguistic advantages on children and abilities in the two languages are significantly related or interdependent. Bilingual children perform better in school when the school effectively teaches the mother tongue and, where appropriate, develops literacy in that language. By contrast, when children are encouraged to reject their mother tongue and, consequently, its development stagnates, their personal and conceptual foundation for learning is undermined. Children’s mother tongues are fragile and easily lost in the early years of school. Many people marvel at how quickly bilingual children seem to “pick up” conversational skills in the second language in the early years at school (although it takes much longer for them to catch up to native speakers in academic language skills). However, educators are often much less aware about how quickly children can lose their ability to use their mother tongues, even in the home context. The extent and rapidity of language loss will vary according to the concentration of families from a particular linguistic group in the school and neighborhood. Where the mother tongue is used extensively in the community outside the school, then language loss among young children will be less. However, where language communities are not concentrated or “ghettoized” in particular neighborhoods, children can lose their ability to communicate in their mother tongue within 2-3 years of starting school. They may retain receptive (understanding) skills in the language but they will use the second language in speaking with their peers and siblings and in responding to their parents. By the time children become adolescents, the linguistic gap between parents and children has become an emotional chasm. Pupils frequently become alienated from the cultures of both home and school with predictable results.Teachers can also help children retain and develop their mother tongues by communicating to them strong affirmative messages about the value of knowing additional languages and the fact that bilingualism is an important linguistic and intellectual accomplishment. For example, they can initiate classroom projects focused on (a) developing children’s language awareness (e.g. surveying and celebrating the multilingualism of students in the class) and (b) the sharing of languages in the class (e.g. every day a child brings one significant word from the home language into class and the entire class, including the teacher, learns and discusses this word.To reject a child’s language in the school is to reject the child. When the message, implicit or explicit, communicated to children in the school is ‘Leave your language and culture at the schoolhouse door’, children also leave a central part of who they are-their identities-at the schoolhouse door. When they feel this rejection, they are much less likely to participate actively and confidently in classroom instruction. It is not enough for teachers to passively accept children’s linguistic and cultural diversity in the school. They must be proactive and take the initiative to affirm children’s linguistic identity by having posters in the various languages of the community around the school, encouraging children to write in their mother tongues in addition to the second language (e.g. write and publish pupil-authored bilingual books), and generally create an instructional climate where the linguistic and cultural experience of the whole child is actively accepted and validated. The author is Umutara Polytechnic’s Vice rector in charge of academics.
