Cape Town - Issues of language and exclusion in schools were key topics of Professor Carolyn McKinney's recent inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
The lecture was titled “How are we failing our children? Language and exclusion in schooling”.
The talk, which took place on August 14, heard that learners should be taught in their native language to grasp the subject matter more efficiently compared to the current situation where English—foreign to them—is used as a language of instruction.
It also focused on how learners must continue with their African language instruction in Grade four, with English added to the instruction, to be more proficient in the language as opposed to the current system where African language instruction ends at Grade three.
“But it is also a story of inequality that we can change going forward. It is not a hopeless story but a hopeful story which takes the responsibility of all of us.”
Contributing to international research in critical applied and sociolinguistics, her research shows how colonial and racialised beliefs about language and literacy, or language ideologies, fuel the deficit positioning of multilingual and African language-speaking children.
Her talk covered three different research projects conducted over a period of 20 years in very different spaces, from under-resourced to elite, well-resourced schools, and in informal learning spaces outside the formal schooling domain.
“What is very striking and disturbing that I’ve noticed over time is that people react very differently in an experiment where grade six white boys in an elite school are taught science in isiXhosa as a third language.
“It is when people actually see those white boys struggling that the penny drops as to what is going on, and the really heart-breaking reality of that is that actually it’s because people expect the black children to struggle and they don’t expect the white children to struggle.
“When they see those white children struggling that’s when they realise what’s really going on for most of our children at schools,” she said.
She added that “forcing children to be English monolingual is forcing them coloniality. English speakers are the most monolingual, who have turned their deficit to be something superior”.
Professor McKinney said there has been a fantastic pilot with bilingual education in isiXhosa, Sesotho and English in the Eastern Cape.
Teachers move between English and the children’s familiar language. But when it comes to written activities, those are done in monolingual English, including assessments.
“What happens is that this emergent bilingual learners are positioned as deficient bilinguals because their isiXhosa, isiZulu, or Setswana is no longer a resource they are allowed to use in any of their subject areas except when they do that language as a subject.
“They are now seen as deficient monolinguals, not good enough in one language, whatever other resources they have don’t count.”
Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) CEO Lance Schultz said that global statistics indicate that many speakers of Indigenous languages do not have access to education in their mother tongues.
“It is crucial to emphasise the importance of using the mother tongue in society and education to address the historical linguistic injustices that continue to affect us today.
“We believe that education in the mother tongue should begin from early childhood and continue through the university level, as it forms the foundation of learning,” Schultz said.
Schultz said that the Department of Basic Education (DBE) should expedite the nationwide implementation of mother tongue-based Bilingual education to make knowledge accessible in students' languages.
The DBE referred the Weekend Argus to recent comments made by Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube about last month in her Budget Vote speech.
“Literacy is the only way we can unlock economic opportunities for our learners in the future...While there has been some improvements, our literacy and numeracy rates remain unacceptably low,” Gwarube said.
“This is why we move towards utilising and exploiting the value of mother-tongue based bilingual education.”
In an address at the Kievet Reading Panel last week, Gwarube expanded on this by emphasising, "Children who learn in their mother tongue are better equipped to succeed."