Big language changes planned for schools in South Africa

BASIC Education minister Angie Motshekga says her department will move forward with plans to incorporate mother-tongue languages at the country’s schools.

Answering in a parliamentary Q&A on Wednesday (9 March), Motshekga said that one of the biggest reasons why South African children have such poor reading comprehension skills is that they are essentially learning in a ‘foreign language’ by being taught in English.

She said that the government had already held successful mother-tongue pilot projects in the Eastern Cape, and was looking to expand these to schools in other provinces.

As part of the pilot, 2,015 schools are using IsiXhosa and Sesotho as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) beyond the foundation phase. Learners in these schools are taught Mathematics, Natural Science and Technology in their home languages IsiXhosa and Sesotho. “The bottom line is that we need to adopt mother-tongue instruction in South Africa,” she said.

However, the