Posted by Sorosoro on November 27, 2010
 

 
By Finnish sociolinguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas who has specialized in multilingual education, among other research topics, and is involved in mother-tongue education projects in Nepal and India.
 
 
 
When children come to school, they can talk in their mother tongue about concrete everyday things: they can see and touch the things they are talking about and they get immediate feedback if they do not understand. They speak fluently, with a native accent, and they know the basic grammar and many concrete words. They can explain all the basic needs in the mother tongue.

This may be enough for the first grades in school where teachers are still talking about things that the child knows. But later in school children need abstract intellectually and linguistically much more demanding concepts; they need to be able to understand and talk about things far away (e.g. in geography, history) or things that cannot be seen (e.g. mathematical and scientific concepts). They need to be able to solve problems using just language and abstract reasoning.

Children need to develop these abstract concepts on the basis of what they already know in their mother tongue. If the development of the mother tongue cognitive-academic language proficiency (which mainly happens through formal education) is cut off when the child starts school, s/he may never have an opportunity to develop higher abstract thinking in any language.

If teaching is in a language that the Indigenous/Tribal/Minority child does not know, the child sits in the classroom the first 2-3 years without understanding, without developing his/her capacity to think with the help of language, and without learning almost anything of the subjects that s/he is taught.

This is why many Indigenous/Tribal/Minority children leave school early, not having learned properly how to read and write, not having developed their mother tongue, and almost without any school knowledge.

If the child has the mother tongue as the teaching language, s/he understands the teaching, learns the subjects, develops the cognitive-academic language proficiency in the mother tongue, and has very good chances of becoming a thinking, knowledgeable person who can continue the education.