Literacy, education, and the language issue

Virtually everyone agrees that a person can learn most easily and readily in a language that a person speaks well. For a variety of reasons, however, in most developing countries, neither children nor adults have access to educational instruction in a language they speak well. This is one of the reasons that education in some of these countries has been very ineffective.

The linguistic profile of many developing countries is extremely complex with numerous countries having hundreds of different languages spoken within their borders. To have some common means of communication, the founding fathers of such countries had to choose a language to be the official or national language. In most cases, this choice was the colonial language of the country.

Often, this “official” language is a language that no one speaks as a first language or mother tongue. Nonetheless, the official language is the only language of education. To be successful in the learning process, the child or the adult must master both the language and the teaching content simultaneously.

If one looks at a list of the 20 countries with the lowest percentage of eligible children in primary school, 18 or 19 (depending on how one counts) lack a widely spoken language which is also the official language of education.

A look at the data on school attendance at the secondary level shows a similar picture. There are 14 countries in which less than 10 percent of the eligible children and young people are in secondary schools. Nine of these lack a widely spoken language which is also the language of education.

Educators and policy makers in such countries are beginning to pay attention to the problem of language in education. Existing models that use “foreign” languages are modestly successful at best and dismal failures at worst. The call for new models is getting louder. The African statement prepared for the World Social Summit in 1995 urged that all African countries seek to provide at least four years of education to every child and that this education should be in the mother tongue of the child.

Mother-tongue or bilingual education is somewhat controversial. Some see it as being too costly and technically difficult to implement. Others say it does not work. Many are afraid that mother-tongue education will lead to factionalism and conflict.

There is not a large amount of hard data to support mother-tongue education as a policy. Western countries which have experimented with bilingual education have not had good results. Third World countries which have had better results have been indifferent about comparative research and the careful data collection needed to do such research. Nadine Dutcher published a study in 1982, in which the available data provided cautious support for bilingual education when done conscientiously. Pat Davis' dissertation research on Peru (Davis, P. 1994) provides strong statistical support for mother-tongue education in the one language she studied. Additional supporting anecdotal evidence circulates from countries like Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and India.

In many of the linguistically complex and poorer countries, the question will probably be, “When and how can we initiate mother-tongue education?” rather than, “Is mother-tongue education for us?”

• Baker 1993
• Davis, P. 1994
• Dutcher 1982
• Pattanayak 1981

• Fact module: Literacy, education, and the language issue
• In overview module: Background issues in literacy, by Stephen L. Walter
• In modular book: Prepare for a literacy program, by Stephen L. Walter, Mary Morgan, and Leah B. Walter
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 1 October 1999

© 1999 SIL International