The disadvantaged sections will gain from the adoption of mother tongue in higher education institutes.
The Budget is a carefully crafted document aiming to cultivate voters of nine states going to polls this year with largess showered on agriculture and infrastructure projects. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is right in believing that the voter wants the glitz of infra in every field. It is a politically paying proposition.
Mother tongue is the ideal medium for expressing one’s thoughts and feelings because language is such a potent tool. It is the language that a child picks up without his or her conscious effort while interacting with members of his or her own social group.
From the very first years of school, UNESCO has been setting the example and promoting multilingual education based on the mother tongue. According to research, mother tongue education is essential for inclusivity and high-quality learning. It also enhances learning outcomes and academic achievement. Most importantly, mother tongue-based multilingual education gives all students the ability to participate fully in the society. Moreover, in India, the promotion of Indian languages in higher education is in sync with one of the focal points of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. About 95 per cent of students, who receive primary education in their mother tongue, face difficulty during their Higher education and should not be left out in their pursuit of higher studies.
NEP provides for higher education institutions and programmes in higher education to use the mother tongue or local language as a medium of instruction, besides offering programs bilingually. According to research, having a strong mother tongue foundation leads to a much better understanding of the curriculum as well as a more positive attitude toward school. It simultaneously fosters a whole host of other essential skills, such as critical thinking and literacy skills. Thus, it is critical that children keep their first language when they start school in a different language, as it also equips children with the skills they need to learn additional languages, allowing them to transfer their understanding of the structure of language to several new languages.
Moreover, research by Yared Seid showed that when children were taught in their primary schools with their mother tongue as the medium of instruction, it did improve their education outcome.
It also enhances the attributes of learning for students such as emotional development, besides having a very powerful impact on the formation of the individual. Mother language has such an important role in framing one’s thinking, emotions, and spiritual world, because the most important stage of one’s life, childhood, is spent in its imprints.
This is especially relevant for students who are first-generation learners (the first ones in their entire generation to go to school and receive an education) or the ones coming from rural areas, who may feel intimidated by unfamiliar concepts in an alien language.
In terms of education, the mother tongue, home language, or first language refers to the language that a child uses to communicate with others, interact with the outside world, and make sense of their surroundings.
There is an impending challenge to ensuring the availability of ‘Quality Material in Regional Languages’ such as textbooks and scholarly literature. Along with availability, ensuring quality control of the translations has become pivotal. Attracting and retaining quality teachers who are willing and able to teach in regional languages is a challenge. Language diversity is important for the balance of cultures, whereas focusing on one language can restrict exposure to different places and cultures due to language barriers. We may lose our advantage of being multilingual, for which ensuring a balance of languages is important. Moreover, a strict focus on regional languages can slow down the capacity of competing at global levels of education. Delivering technical courses in regional languages may prevent students from competing in global labor and education markets, where fluency in English yields a distinct edge. It is important to create a strong and successful bilingual/multilingual programme in the early years of schooling in a multilingual nation like India. The goal of teaching English in the early years should be to achieve basic conversational ability. However, when using the mother tongue as a medium of instruction, the accessibility barrier is removed because it accepts prospective students and their parents.
For multilingual children, there isn’t a single model that fits all of their learning needs and contexts. Each school and community should determine what works best for them in terms of multilingual and mother tongue education. However, in general, the educational benefits that can be predicted are larger the longer a child can learn in and through his or her native languages.
(The author is Founder, Top Parent)
