The proportion of native speakers of English or French in most African countries will be less than 10 percent. Why then do some parents in the former British and French colonies go to the extent of training their children to speak in English or in French at home?
Why some parents train their children in a foreign language
The education systems in Sub-Saharan African countries were essentially started by the English missionaries, and by the French and Portuguese colonialists. The language of instruction in all of Africa, especially at the secondary and post secondary levels has therefore predominantly been in the language of the former colonialist country. Why do some parents still want to train their children at ages 1-5 and up to pre-secondary school level in English, French and Portuguese, even after independence more than 60 years ago, ?
The answer basically is that some parents realise that English or French is the official language used in the administration of their countries. The thinking of some parents in most of the former colonies is therefore to start training their children from an early age in the language in which the administration of their country is conducted, and in the language in which secondary school and higher education in their country is also carried out. To train their children to get a head-start in understanding and speaking in the official language for administration and instruction at the higher levels of education is therefore their aim.
With this thinking, some parents will enroll their children in kindergarten schools where instruction and facilitation are conducted in English or in French. And will obviously enroll
their children in private primary schools where instruction is conducted in English or in French.
Does it matter the language your child speaks at home?
Yes! The language children speak at home matters a great deal .The question is: “Does speaking in English or in French at home, from the age of 2 years or even earlier, help the child to excel in their learning in primary, secondary and post-secondary education?” The answer is No! The child may be better in English or in French speaking up to the end of primary education; but there is no guarantee that the child will be better in their school learning after age 12. In secondary school and thereafter, the young person may be exposed to other young boys and girls from other primary school backgrounds some of who may be more ambitious in learning and would probably be more talented in other life areas such as entrepreneurship, creative arts, science and a variety of other professions. The literary line of English and French is not the only area that parents should think about.
The Mother Tongue or L1 with which a child begins their life is generally the language spoken by parents, siblings, and other relatives in the house. It is generally also the language spoken in the community. It is the language of the environment in which the child has been born, and in which the child will most likely grow into adulthood.
Before secondary school, a parent must make sure the child learns to use the mother tongue at home for the following reasons:
- It is this language in which the child learns the virtues of life: honesty, respect etc
- It is the language in which the child learns to express themselves: their source of anger, frustration, joy, and sorrow.
- It is in this language in which the child learns grammatical structures; ways for emphasizing issues, the use and meaning of proverbs.
- It is the language in which the child develops faster thinking capability.
How parents may better help their children learn at home
Parents would help their children better by telling stories to their children at the early ages in their mother tongue. They should tell and read stories of achievement to their children at the early ages of 1-3, or earlier beginning from the day the child is born. And as a parent tells or reads stories to the child, they must help the child from ages 1-3 to acquire deeper understanding of the stories by requiring the child to ask questions using the following:
- Why?
- Who?
- Where?
- When?
- How?
By getting the child to attain deeper understanding of events and issues, a parent will be helping the child in building the foundation for scholarship, intelligent living and success in life. Questions and answers along the above lines prepare the child to engage in high-ability thinking. A parent should spend time to listen and answer the questions the child will ask. Those little minds have the power of osmosis. They readily absorb knowledge. After all, they are new comers to the world and are eager to catch up on the news and events. It will probably take only 5 minutes in the morning to talk and answer a few questions and probably also some 30 minutes in the evening reading stories to the child or telling stories to the child and answering questions.
Expose the child to their environment
The environment of the child, first and foremost, consists of their parents, their close relatives, some of their extended family members and their friends. The environment also consists of the air, the skies, the beaches, the forests, the rivers and all the water bodies in their immediate environment and in the country. All these have been provided by nature for the child and for all humanity to appreciate and enjoy. Take out the child as and when time will allow to show the child the wonders of nature. This is all part of the process of acculturation: the process of helping the child to become an African; a Serra Leonean, a Nigerian, Cameroonian, Algerian, Tanzanian or Congolese.
Equally and importantly, take the child out to observe the lake, the ducks, the forest, the savannah, the beaches and the hills. It is through such visits that a parent helps the child in the processes of concept formation. Visits of such nature help the child to develop mental images of a variety of concepts. At any time the child hears the word “lake”, the concept of lake immediately appears in the child’s mind. Human beings think mostly in pictures. The more mental pictures a parent will help the child to attain, the faster the child will be able to put together a number of concepts to think and respond to a variety of issues in their life.
Allow time and space for the child to play with their friends. It is interesting, even funny, to see a baby elephant playing in the forest alongside its mother in a movie. Children of most creatures learn by playing. Let your child bring their friends home to meet their parents. Do not make your child live a life without friends. Some parents do not want their children to make friends. Well, that may be due to some bad experiences the parents may have had in the past with a friend or with some friends. The former Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Late Kofi Annan, was a person who, from his young years developed a natural habit for forming friendships. He was a person who made friends very easily. Making friends was very natural to him. But he also studied his books in school.
Children of today will need their friends the more when they attain the age of 70 and above. From that age, many friends begin to drop out of the world. And a person needs a friend to talk to, to feel alive.
Help the child to learn the virtues of life
Virtues of life are also referred to as the values of life. Most of these virtues are universal. Take time to help your child to learn the virtues of life. Explain each of the following with examples.
- Honesty
- Truthfulness
- Obedience
- Respect
- Trust
- Compassion
- Humility
- Love
- Kindness
- Hospitality
Reward the child when they show any of such virtues. Rewards are not necessarily monetary rewards. A pat on the head; remarks such as “Very Good”; “Well done” are all that is needed. For rewards on occasions when a child has done something extraordinarily special, the parent could buy the child a gift, take the child to a restaurant, or give the child some special treat at home.
Help the child to build positive attitude toward life and religion
Encourage the child to develop the attitude and mind-set of achievers. Tell the child about the bravery of past political achievers of your country and of Africa. Discuss the lives of some of the political leaders who fought hard to liberate their country from colonial rule with the child.
Tell the child about the great business men and women who set up businesses, built factories, employed many people to work, made a lot of money and built schools and hospitals for their town or country.
Inform the child about the famous doctors and engineers that their country has produced. Help the child to believe that they can do whatever they wished to do successfully only if they put their mind to it and thought about it most of the time.
Do not tell ghost stories to frighten the child. Ghost stories scare the little child who in adult life may become afraid to enter a forest or stay in a forest at night for purposes of making some scientific observations.
It is known in psychology that children who listen to stories of bravery and achievement live to achieve great things. Such children become oriented toward achievement early in their lives.
You could use Christian, Muslim and other religious books or documents to help the child to develop morality and a positive attitude toward God.
Help the child to develop high-ability thinking skills
High-ability thinking skills were introduced in education as far back as sixty years ago and yet not all school systems, even tertiary level institutions, teach pupils and students how to engage in high-ability thinking.
The child begins their life by asking questions and receiving answers. By asking questions and receiving answers, the child acquires knowledge; the child receives knowledge. This is the receptive stage for the child. As they grow up, a parent expects the child to be able to produce answers to issues and problems. The child moves from reception of knowledge to production of knowledge as they grow up. Production of knowledge is a higher form of thinking.
What educators call low-ability thinking skills are the following:
- Knowledge acquisition
- Understanding knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge basically involves acquiring facts. Factual knowledge includes knowledge of the capitals of countries; rules of addition and subtraction in mathematics; how water vapor turns into rain in science and many others. These are mostly
- Facts,
- Rules, formulas and
- Procedures
Life involves knowing a great deal of facts in many subjects including all the above and many more.
Understanding
Understanding or comprehension involves the ability to give examples of some information to show that the child, pupil or student has understood what is being taught. This means the child should be able to re-state the information given or give examples of a piece of information in his or her own words. When a child is guided to understand some information, that child is now on their way to being able to apply the information.
High-ability thinking skills
The four aspects of high-ability thinking are the following:
- Application of knowledge
- Analysis of knowledge
- Evaluation of knowledge
- Creative thinking (also known as “synthesis of knowledge” or “inventive thinking skills”)
Application of knowledge: By the age of 4 years, the child should be helped to apply the knowledge they have acquired at home. Simple application of the use of addition, subtraction, and division symbols could be useful preparation for primary school starting just two years ahead,
Division and fractions are a little tricky for children. A parent can help the child better in these areas by using the local currencies for faster understanding and application of knowledge: Dalasi, Leones, Cedis, Naira, Pula and other currencies.
Story problems are useful for teaching the child a lot of application situations. Example:
Aunty Salamatu sells bread in her shop at the corner of the street. Aunty Salamatu is a good Muslim. Every Friday she closes her shop at 12.30pm and goes to the Mosque at 1.00pm for prayers. She comes back home at 5pm after prayers at the Mosque and after visiting her grand children in their homes.
Today is Friday. Uncle Thomas has come to visit. The time is 2.00pm. Uncle Thomas likes drinking tea with bread a lot. Mummy has asked Mary aged 10 to go quickly to Aunty Salamatu’s shop to buy some bread for Uncle Thomas. What should Mary say to Mummy?
Analysis of knowledge: Analysis most often provides the answer to the question: Why?
Example of a story for analysis: Pious, a boy of 16 years did not like going to school when he was a little boy. Pious works in a shop but the owner of the shop does not pay Pious very well.
The owner of the shop pays those who finished school very well. Pious walks to work everyday. He does not have enough money to travel on the bus to work.
What should Pious do so that the shop owner would pay him higher salary?
Parents could find other such simple stories for the child to learn how to analyse situations and provide answers.
Evaluation of knowledge: Evaluation is the ability to judge the quality of some action or some product. It is the ability to say whether an action is wrong, right or just satisfactory. You teach the child that it is wrong to tell lies. Another child has told a lie. Now you ask your child whether that child has done the right thing or the wrong thing.
Someone has been disrespectful to another person. You ask the child to say whether the one who showed disrespect has done the right thing or not. Let the child respond and then ask him or her to explain why he or she responded the way they did.
Provide situations that will require the child to make judgments such as good, poor, very bad.
Provide other situations that will require the child to make a choice between colours; e.g. this colour will be better than that one etc.
Creative thinking: Creative thinking involves using knowledge and skills acquired in different areas of life to create a new product, which may be a story or a practical product such as a basket, a pottery or some artifact. Ask your child to draw their daddy or mummy. Later ask the child to draw and colour mummy or daddy, or their sibling.
Ask the child to tell a story or write a short story, that is, if the child has reached the age where he/she can compose and write a story.
High ability thinking gets more complicated as children grow and enter secondary school and tertiary institutions. High-ability thinking skills are also referred to as “Critical thinking skills”. The two terms are used interchangeably.
It is high-ability thinking and the power of imagination that all inventions are made: the steam ship and later versions; the aircraft; the space craft; the internet, artificial intelligence and many other scientific inventions of the present generation.
Because critical thinking skills form very important area of teaching and learning from kindergarten to the tertiary level, Africa Supreme will make plans to develop examples of questions, activity plans and guidelines to help parents to provide meaningful support for their children some months later.
Never scold the child
If a child makes a mistake that requires punishment, tell the child exactly what he or she did that merits the punishment. If you don’t tell the child what they did wrong first, he or she will become confused about why he or she had been punished and may for a long time never trust the parent; and in some cases, even dislike the parent.
Avoid using scolding words on the child. Statements such as the following must never be used on the child:
- Your big head
- Your big nose
- Foolish boy or foolish girl
The little girl who was scolded with “big head,” will at the age of 22 become the Beauty Queen of her region or even the country. That big head you saw was only the transitionary period of growing up. It was not going to be a permanent feature of her life.
Derogatory remarks that destroy the self-esteem of the child must be avoided.
“You are no good” and such other remarks should be avoided.
Don’t threaten and don’t allow anyone else to threaten the child with the possibility of doing physical harm to the child.
A statement like “I’ll beat you” to a 2-year old child is unacceptable.
Add some English and French words and sentences
By starting the training of the child using the mother tongue, a parent helps the child to plant their feet firmly in the culture in which the child was born. It is the process of going from the known to the unknown. The child begins early in life to learn words and idiomatic expressions in their mother tongue; a type of knowledge and skill they will transfer later when learning a foreign language or some other subject.
Living in former English or French colonies invariably exposes people, young and old to the English and French languages. At the ages of 1-3 and before kindergarten, a parent should add some English or French words and sometimes some sentences in the conversations between parent and child. In this way, the child now begins to move to another cultural zone, and this becomes much easier.
By age 4-5 of the child, a parent could select one day in a week or in a month. On this day, for 3-6 hours, all communication between parent and child will be conducted in English or French. This practice will help the child to gain respectable mastery of English or French before beginning primary school. At age 5 or 6, the time of communication solely in English or French could be extended to a whole day.
Kindergarten and primary school days
Children generally need external motivation. Their source of motivation comes from the outside; from parents and from friends. The source of motivation for many adults is internal.
For this reason, at the age of 4 when many children enter kindergarten, the parent must try to visit the child’s school once a term to talk to the child’s teacher about the how well the child is doing in class and also say a word or two to the child.
When the child comes home, the parent should discuss what the teacher said about the child with the child himself or herself. If the teacher’s comments were negative, find a way to use the teacher’s comments to encourage the child. Something like this should help: “Your teacher says you are doing well in class, but you should ……….(Use the words that will encourage and help the child to make the necessary adjustments and corrections to their school work) Pay attention to what the teacher said about the child and use the comments to help the child.
The same system for encouraging the child should be used when the child enters primary school. From age 6 to age 12, the child still needs external motivation. Visit the child’s school, once a term or at least once a year. Talk to the child’s teacher and later discuss what the teacher told you about the child. Together with the child, find ways by which negative comments from the teacher could be corrected and improved. At the end of each conversation on the parent’s kindergarten or primary school visit, the parent should say some encouraging words to the child.
School reports
A parent must read the child’s end of term school report and discuss the work of the child during the term with the child. In case the parents are illiterate, they should get a relative who is literate to read the child’s school report and help the parents to advise the child on the steps to take to improve their school performance.
Whether the reports are good or bad, the parent must always use positive words to help encourage the child to improve their school performance. “Very Good” comment could still be improved to “Excellent”.
Visiting the child’s school to talk to their teacher, and reading the end of term school report shows the child that you care about them. The love and care of their parents are the greatest sources of their inspiration and motivation.
Effects of training the child in the mother tongue
A number of studies have been conducted by researchers in the past and also in present times to find out the differences in learning between children who are taught in English and those who are taught in the local vernacular. In one of such studies decades ago, a senior lecturer in the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, George Collison, taught one primary school class a set of science lessons in Fante, a major local language in the Central Region of the country. He also taught the same set of science lessons in English in another primary school all over a period of three months.
At the end of the three months, the researcher administered a science examination paper written in Fante to the class that was taught in Fante, and another examination paper written in English to the class that was taught in English. The results showed very significant differences between the class that was taught in the local Fante language and the class that was taught in English. The range of scores for the class that was taught in Fante was from the 70s to the high 80s. The range of scores for the class that was taught in English was from the 30s to the 60s.
Some of the effects that have been found so far in using the mother tongue at kindergarten and the primary school levels are as follows:
Pupils:
- Understand what they learn better
- Are able to read and understand better
- Develop critical thinking skills
- Perform better in examinations
- Retain knowledge they acquire more, and therefore do not need to be re-taught when they move to a higher school class or transfer to another language.
