Johannesburg - ‘Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”
If these words by US writer Rita Mae Brown are true, what do they mean for the 80 percent of South Africans who have vernacular languages as their mother tongue?
It’s a fact that the usage and potency of the country’s vernacular languages is diminishing.
Research conducted by the Department of Basic Education in 2007 showed close to 80 percent of children were taught in English or Afrikaans.
By law, pupils must be taught in their mother tongue and a first additional language, while a second additional language is optional.
When registering their children, parents must indicate in which language they want them to be taught.
According to the South African Schools Act, it’s the responsibility of the school governing body (SGB) to develop the school’s language policy. Schools are supposed to be multilingual.
The fact that a majority of children are taught in English despite it not being their home language is attributed to the fact that black parents choose it as it’s an international language and they feel it will enable their children to succeed in higher education and in the workplace.
The fact that vernacular languages were previously marginalised and not developed in the academic sector as English and Afrikaans were also played a role in this.
Developments in the basic and higher education sector are intent on changing this. When delivering the basic education budget vote two weeks ago, Minister Angie Motshekga announced that “in 2014, a new policy will come into effect mandating the learning of an African language in all schools”.
Questions to the department’s spokesman, Panyaza Lesufi, and Motshekga’s spokeswoman, Hope Mokgatlhe, on whether the department had enough vernacular language teachers to roll this out on a national scale, among others, were not answered.
SGB associations, however, whose responsibility it is to develop school language policies, didn’t hold back in expressing their views.
Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools chief executive Paul Colditz said that in principle, the federation supported the idea of multilingualism as it improved pupils’ abilities to communicate effectively. Implementing the policy, though, does not seem feasible, he said.
Colditz said the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, the policy statement that spells out how the curriculum should be delivered, does not make provision for an additional language.
“If you introduce a third language, there won’t be space for it in the curriculum. There won’t be enough teaching time - you’d have to expand the school day or drop one of the existing languages,” he said.
“The second issue is the availability of teachers. We have almost 25 000 schools in the country with an average of 500 pupils each. For a new subject to be introduced, each school would need at least two new teachers to teach it. That’s plus/minus 50 000 new teachers. Where are we going to get them?”
Colditz said that in addition to hiring more teachers, the proposed policy has huge cost implications in terms of teacher training, additional school facilities, and teaching and learning materials.
He said that in metro areas where children who speak different home languages were in one class, it would be difficult to decide which language to add.
Governors’ Alliance secretary Kathy Callaghan said Motshekga’s announcement was premature.
“It’s all good and well to announce it, but do we have the teaching manpower at all levels to implement this policy?” she said.
Callaghan also asked if funding for implementing this policy had been allocated.
The findings of the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (Needu) National Report 2012 cast more doubt on the education system’s ability and society’s willingness to successfully implement this ambitious policy.
The Needu report found that SGBs, even those in deep rural areas, were opting to use English as a language of learning and teaching (LOLT). The report concedes that “learners whose home language was different to the school LOLT found it difficult to understand their teachers. This also made it difficult for their parents and guardians to assist them with homework.”
This, however, doesn’t stop these parents and guardians from insisting that their children be taught in English. A school in the Eastern Cape - one of the 133 primary schools visited for this section of the Needu report - justified its use of English as a LOLT on the grounds that parents were demanding it and were threatening to remove their children from the school if their demands weren’t met.
Another school in Mpumalanga said it was phasing out mother tongue instruction in grades 1 to 3 because of the difficulties pupils had with the sudden switch to English in Grade 4. This phenomenon was illustrated by the 2011 Annual National Assessment results, where there was a sudden drop in scores from Grade 3 to Grade 4 pupils.
This is what prompted the department to mandate that schools offer English home language from Grade 1 so that pupils can easily transcend to English medium schooling from Grade 4 onwards.
Despite the clash in views, some maintain that rolling out the teaching of vernacular languages in schools is a positive and necessary move.
The director of the Wits Language School, Dr Nhlanhla Thwala, dismisses the notion that it is impractical to implement.
“It’s feasible, it’s a question of will. Since 1994 we’ve known we had to do this, but we haven’t done it. The question is: If we’re not able to do it, why is that?” he said.
Thwala noted that vernacular languages were taught during the apartheid era.
He conceded that there may not be enough teachers to roll this out, but they could be trained.
He admitted that at tertiary level, students were not interested in studying vernacular languages. Thwala said he believed that policies such as these would serve as an incentive for students to take up vernacular language studies.
On the argument that African languages weren’t spoken or used properly in cities where people speak a little bit of everything, he said: “The English that you and I are speaking is not the same English they use in the US or the UK. Languages differ, but the difference is not substantial enough to prevent understanding.”
The Star