We found that far too many children were entering school with weak oral language skills and were acquiring alphabetic knowledge and fluency far too slowly. This limited their reading comprehension and academic progress through school.

Support effective teaching methodsSuccessful teaching of early literacy skills is dependent notonly on the provision of suitable materials, but also on theway these skills are introduced and taught. Rote learning andmemorization, with a textbook focus, will likely result in achild’s reading fluency and comprehension remaininglimited. Teachers need to use engaging instructionalstrategies, where children are active in the learning process.Such strategies only become feasible when childrenunderstand the language of instruction and can therefore beinteractively engaged.
Train and deploy mother tongue teachersMother-tongue education requires teachers whom share thelanguage and culture of the children. It also requires thatteachers are trained in the same language they are to teachin. Some teachers may not be truly proficient in the languageof instruction, and may struggle with teaching in a‘dominant’ language they are not fluent in themselves orthey may come from a minority language group and havebeen excluded from the learning process due to a lack oftraining materials in their language. Sometimes a lack ofunderstanding can cascade down the generations where ateacher, who never fully understood their own teacher, isattempting to teach a child who barely understands thelanguage.CONCLUSIONSMany children from corner to corner the developing worldare learning very little in school, a truth that can beconnected to teaching that is in a linguistic they do notcompletely understand. It is a practice that leads toinadequate or non-existent learning and acquisition ofknowledge and skills, alienating experiences, and high drop-out and repetition rates. To develop the quality of education,language policies need to take account of mother-tonguelearning. Models of education which ignore the mothertongue in the early years can be unproductive, ineffectiveand have a negative effect on children’s learning. Mother-tongue teaching at least in early years can enable teachers toteach, and learners to learn further effectively. For too long,mother-tongue education has been mostly unnoticed bypolicy makers. While there are encouraging signs that thepolicy pendulum is beginning to swing towards a greaterunderstanding of the importance of mother-tongue learning,there is still a long way to go. More governments aredeveloping policies and programmes that take account ofmother tongue in the early stages of learning, but there isstill a need to express better policies, make sure betterpreparation for the introduction of second languages andensure adequate resources are set aside. The GlobalCampaign for Education believes that evidence proposes thatthere is assured areas which should be prioritized in policydevelopment, to confirm more responsive and well nuancedpolicy development in the field of mother tongue learning