Nina van Wyk (I was asked to argue for mother tongue education)

YES

The benefits of learning in one's mother tongue are no longer disputed. Many studies can attest to this fact. The following points have been drawn from a variety of sources which prove that mother tongue education is not only beneficial but crucial.

Studies have shown that when students are taught in their first language they have a better understanding of the learning material. Students were also found to be more likely to be interested in what they are learning.

Another study revealed that if a person were to form tow groups of learners both learning topics such as Maths and Science, one group being taught in their mother tongue and the other group in a second language, the group learning in their first language will have a better basic understanding of the subject than those who learn in a second language.

In a mother tongue project in the small village of Diembering, in south-west Senegal, 11 out of 18 students who were using their mother tongue in all lessons passed all their exams. They also found the mother tongue taught classes to be more student centred, with more use of interactive teaching methods. Ongoing monitoring of that project shows that those students are more confident and enthusiastic.

It is also true that an education which enforces a dominant language by ignoring, stigmatising, and replacing or displacing the mother tongue of the minority and indigenous students is called subtractive language education, meaning it subtracts from the students' linguistic inventory, instead of adding to it.

This form of education is also called submersion education, because it is achieved by submersing the children of indigenous and minority peoples in the culture and language of the dominant society using a range of strategies, both subtle and noticable, and expecting the children to sink or swim. It teaches students (some of) the dominant langauge at the cost of their mother tongue. It neither respects the mother tongue nor does it promote fluency in the dominant language.

Most of the world's spoken languages will become extinct in this century and this cannot be called 'language loss', or 'language death', because iot is not a natural occurance and it is not without organisation.

When a language is forced by a dominant state onto dominated indigenous or minority linguistic groups with the purpose of wiping out minority languages and reducing the number of languages in the wolrd, it can be called linguistic imperialism.

As many as 90-95% of the world;s spoken languages, including most indigenous languages (a prediction also used by UNESCO), couls be facing extinction before the end of this century.

Wiping out people's mother tongue in education, causes undesirable social, economic, political and psycological degradation for indigenous and minority peoples, which allow and justify further dominantion of these peoples. Therefore, it is a threat to the social, political, economic and psycological survival of these peoples.

If you destroy the language of a people you also stamp out the history and cultural knowledge of that people forever.