As a language and literacy professional and a staunch advocate of Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education (MTBE) in our schools, perhaps I should be one of those jubilating over the Minister for Education, Haruna Iddrisu’s ‘directive’ to the Director-General of Ghana Education Service (GES) to ensure that the use of mother tongue is compulsory in schools. Unfortunately, I am not.
Indeed, research on MTBE suggests that substantial instruction using the child’s primary language (L1) enhances the child’s intellectual and academic resources and provides a conceptual foundation for long-term growth.
The maintenance of the L1 helps the student to communicate with parents and grandparents; this, in turn, increases the active participation of parents in their child’s school-related activities.
Using the language and cultural knowledge of the pupils affirms their identities and promotes their academic achievements.
To derive these benefits, however, it would require the development of a well-thought-through through all-inclusive language-in-education policy framework and implementation plan.
Unspoken Reality
Before I became the Director-General (DG) of Ghana Education Service in 2017, I had chastised the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service at the least opportunity for failing to fully implement the early-exit mother tongue-based bilingual education policy.
In 2002, when the government introduced a new English-only policy to be used at all levels of schooling in Ghana, I criticised the policy profusely. I was glad when the early-exit policy was reintroduced somewhere in 2010.
In office as DG, it took me less than a school term of three months to come face-to-face with the unspoken reality and to appreciate the enormity of the issue and, to some extent, side with the 2002 government decision.
Ghana is a multilingual and linguistically heterogeneous country. Estimates of the number of indigenous languages spoken vary from 30 (Spencer 1971) to over 83 languages (check: www.ethnologue.org), including cross-border languages such as Hausa.
Early-exit
However, since the 1970s, we have predominately used an early-exit language-in-education policy, which makes only nine out of the 83 Ghanaian languages -Akan (in its three varieties: Asanti Twi, Akuapem Twi and Fanti), Dagaare-Wali, Dagbani, Dangme, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Kasem and Nzema- the medium of instruction in the first three years of schooling.
The policy poses implementation challenges for the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the West African Examinations Council (WAEC). At the Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) level, the Ghanaian language is compulsory for all candidates.
Each candidate, irrespective of their mother tongue, is expected to learn and write a paper in one of the nine officially approved languages.
In the Western and Western North regions, for example, school authorities get Aowin, Ahanta, Wassa and Sefwi children to learn and write their BECE local language compulsory paper in either Fanti or Nzema, while some schools in the two regions opt for Asante Twi.
In the five Northern regions of the country, only four languages – Dagaare, Dagbani, Gonja and Kasem – are available to BECE candidates.
There are about thirty different languages in the northern sector of Ghana.
Scenarios
The scenarios described above play up in virtually all the regions across the country.
Urban classrooms are multilingual, and in some cases, the indigenous language of the area may not necessarily be the dominant language of the classroom.
For example, at the Anumle Cluster of Schools in the Kisseman community, Achimota, Accra, the dominant language in the school is not Ga. Similarly, Asante Twi is not the dominant language at Aboabo school in Kumasi.
Also, in Tarkwa, Wassa is not the dominant language in the schools, primarily because of the huge number of migrants due to the mining industry.
While the aspiration remains that mother tongue should be the medium of instruction from Primary One to Primary Three, certain operational challenges make it difficult to give this effect: lack of fully developed orthographies and instructional materials in many local languages, the lack of infrastructural capacity, a shortage of writers in the local languages, the lack of local language teachers and the fact that textbooks are mainly developed in the dominant English language, and, also publishers’ lack of interest in local language materials production, due to the small size of the market.
This brings me to my question: Minister of Education, which mother tongue have you directed the GES to use in the classrooms?
Should they keep to the nine or should they use all 83 languages?
Compulsory mother tongue education?
There is more than meets the eye, Mr Minister!
The writer is a retired Professor and a former Director-General of the Ghana Education Service. Email: kopokuamankwa@gmail.com.
