Teaching in the mother tongue
What Mozambique's bilingual schooling can teach Europe's classrooms
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
When Mozambique became independent in 1975, Portuguese became the language of school and state, even though only a small minority spoke it as a first language. Most children heard the language of instruction for the first time on their first day at school. The result was years of rote learning without understanding, repeated grades and dropping out; a child had to learn a foreign language and, at the same time, learn to read and count in it.
From 1993 to 1997 a pilot project in two provinces first taught children to read and write in their own language and brought Portuguese into the classroom step by step. The external evaluation of the project, which Carolyn Benson published in 2000, described classrooms where children spoke more, asked more and learned with more confidence. From 2003, with the new curriculum for basic education, bilingual schooling entered public education and gradually expanded.
But the expansion came with shortages that Feliciano Chimbutane documented closely in 2011: teachers who had not been trained to teach in local languages, textbooks and dictionaries that either did not exist or arrived late, and the persistent belief of many parents that the road to work and advancement runs through Portuguese. The bilingual school was sometimes seen as a second-class school, not because of the quality of its teaching but because of the standing of its language.
Ana Lúcia Tavares argues that the problem is not pedagogical. That children learn better in a language they understand is no longer in dispute; UNESCO restated it in 2016 on broad evidence. The problem is the political economy of linguistic prestige, and Europe should look at it closely. In the Netherlands, too, the home languages of migrant children are seen more often as an obstacle than as an asset. The lesson of Mozambique is that mother-tongue education succeeds only when knowledge in that language is produced, published and valued: textbooks, dictionaries, scientific terms and digital libraries.
For knowledge systems, this means that a lesson should be one object with several linguistic representations. A lesson written in Changana should not be a weak "local version" of a Portuguese original. It should stand level with it, with the same address, the same references and the same right to be reviewed and improved.
Questions for discussion
- Why does the educational evidence for the mother tongue lose out to the prestige of languages?
- What could European schools gain from migrant children's home languages if they stopped treating them as an obstacle?
- Who should pay for producing knowledge in languages the publishing market does not consider profitable?
References
Benson, Carolyn J. 2000. "The Primary Bilingual Education Experiment in Mozambique, 1993 to 1997." International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 3 (3): 149–166.
Chimbutane, Feliciano. 2011. Rethinking Bilingual Education in Postcolonial Contexts. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
UNESCO. 2016. If You Don't Understand, How Can You Learn? Global Education Monitoring Report, Policy Paper 24. Paris: UNESCO.