Language is said to hold a lot of power on the people because aside from conveying social identity, it influences and shapes how people think, relate, connect and understand each other.
It is defined as a system of symbols, sounds and signs used to convey meaning, express thoughts and communicate ideas, emotions and experiences among people.
Nigeria and other West African states are blessed with multiple languages and one would have expected that the countries, especially Nigeria with over 500 languages would lead in multilingual education but that is not the case.
Despite having a provision in the National Policy of Education that the language of the immediate environment should be the medium of instruction in primary schools, this is only achieved in certain places where three major languages of Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba are practised.
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This development has received an outcry from stakeholders who submit that the learning outcomes has been poor because Nigeria failed to implement multilingual education and thus affects children cognition as they are going to school but not learning, resulting to latest report of children who completed primary six cannot solve simple arithmetic nor be able to read and write simple sentence.
However, as Nigeria joined the rest of the world to mark the 2024 International Literacy Day with the theme, “Promoting Multilingual Education Literacy for Mutual Understanding and Peace”, experts have said it has to be intentional in promoting multilingual education in the country through implementable policies and advocates that will change the narratives of poor learning and out of school children problem.
Speaking at a round table discussion organised by the Quality Education Development Associates, (QEDA) with the theme, ‘Youths as Vanguard for Multilingual Education to Achieve Peace and Mutual Understanding’, to mark the day, an educationist, Dr Rasheedat Sadiq said multilingual education is the ability to learn, speak and understand more than one language.
She noted that the benefits are from the obvious stand point, saying, “People that speak more than one language are more intelligent than those that speak only one language and research has shown that multilingual education helps cognitive flexibility of the brain, improves memory, increases vocabulary and creativity.”
She said: “If you understand more than one language, you are able to empathise with people from another culture and those who have interacted from living in different lands were able to understand other people. Interestingly, language has a character for most people. When I speak phonetics, I see a character come out and when I am speaking pidgin in the market, I see another character.
“So, in promoting peace, understanding other people’s culture, multilingualism is key to that,” she said
However, experts have agreed that promoting multilingual education in Nigeria is faced with challenges that need to be surmounted before it can excel in the area.
An international development expert, Dr Olusoji Adeniyi said Nigeria is challenged when it comes to multilingual education because it has multiple languages and only three are being effectively used while others are nowhere to be heard across the states.
Adeniyi, who is also the founder of Africa Back2Basics Education Initiative said the attitude of parents when it comes to multilingual ability is not encouraging as many believes in the evidence of a child being able to speak beautiful English.
“We rate them based on their phonetic capability and then we say the child is going to a good school and that is when the child now becomes more British than the British people,” he said.
He said: “When we go out with children, some parents will be ashamed to speak local languages to their children. We need to create an environment where we challenge our parents to know that multilingual education is as good as any other education whether it is in English, German or French language.”
While noting that most of those countries (Germans, Asians…) do not teach English in primary and secondary education, he said they start introducing English as a language in tertiary so that when you get to the university you can decide if you want to add that in your curriculum and that will be your choice.
He said the national policy did not say mother tongue, it said language of immediate environment and the difference is that people sometimes don’t understand what that is saying.
“The goal of that policy is that if I am a Yoruba and I am living in Kano , my child should be able to speak and learn in Hausa like a native and it does not stop me from teaching and speaking Yoruba to my child at home,” he said.
“What that means is that the child becomes a carrier of education to the community, so when the child follows the father to the market, the market woman is speaking Hausa, the child is able to educate the woman with the level of plus and minus arithmetic he has learned in school so the whole community engagement is happening because the child is learning with the language of the immediate environment,” he explained.
He said: “We need to understand that the thought behind national language policy is such that education becomes more of a community approach that as the children are moving it from the students’ environment right to home, market, football pitches and playground, they are actually carrying the same content of education and educating everybody along.
“We need to begin to challenge ourselves on how long we deal with incursions from our colonial masters who made us think our languages are vernaculars rather than encouraging us to be bilingual at that time they made us speak English and that is why most of the languages are going extinct,” he said.
He also noted that another challenge is that Nigeria doesn’t have teachers who can teach these languages in an immediate environment.
Also, speaking on the challenges of enforcing multilingual education, the Head of Planning, Policy and Partnership Division at the Teachers Registration Councils (TRCN), Dr. Mary Abah said Nigeria has a language policy but implementation in the country is haphazard.
She noted that because of the policy that there must be a Nigerian language, schools push a particular language on students based on the teachers they have on ground and because of that, children are going to school but they are not learning.
Abah cited that the immediate language in Abuja is not Gbagi, Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba but English is used as a medium of instruction
“We do have a curriculum that favours multilingual education and that is not implemented because teachers do not have training in multilingual and so do not have the capacity to teach in different languages,” she said.
“We must address all these issues in order for us to change our narratives,” she said.
Speaking on the significance of the day, the guest speaker and Executive Chairman of the Abia State Universal Basic Education Board, Mrs. Lydia Onuoha, said out of the over 500 languages in Nigeria, only 60 of them were written while almost 300 languages are going extinct.
She said raising awareness on the importance of multilingual education and how it is tied to digital transformation going on globally will help inspire more efforts towards more inclusive and effective literacy programmes that are going on.
She stated that out of 52 African countries, Nigeria ranks number 35 in literacy level, adding that over four million teachers are needed globally to tackle the issue of acute teacher shortage.
“Literacy is important to our survival and future development, it is an essential instrument that will help eradicate poverty, reduce child mortality, help regulate population increase and to achieve gender equality among others,” she said.
She said: “Being literate includes being literate in one’s mother tongue and we want to encourage that children receive instructions in their early years in the language immediate to them.”
Meanwhile, the Team Lead and founder of QEDA Mr. Nurrudeen Lawal emphasised the need for promoting equitable access to quality education with a strong approach to improving educational outcomes.
He said his decision to bring together literacy experts and media personnel is in creating a dynamic platform for dialogue and action in tackling pressing issues as well as to build networks for further discussions outside the event.
Way forward by stakeholders
Meanwhile, as these stakeholders pushed for the promotion of multilingual education in the country, they made some recommendations, which include but not limited to enforcing attitudinal shifts to promote and accept multilingual education.
They also suggested that the Federal Ministry of Education and all relevant stakeholders organise a conference or national dialogue on implementing the language policy and also that teachers education should focus on multilingual pedagogy to build the capacity of teachers to effectively implement the language policy.
They also called for indigenous language standardisation, use of technology to develop language App, carry out research to provide evidence based locally driven education solution that works for all, promote community based interventions, expose children to multiple languages through music and other elements of culture and organise campaigns to promote languages as a driving force to peace and unity in Nigeria (National action day)
An expert in language education, Prof. Talatu Musa Garba, said Africa’s future depends on its youth, and to make them advocates for education, their interest in multilingual learning must be fostered.
She said it is important for Nigeria to continue to explore different models for education to address the challenges in the sector.
Also, Dr Abah noted that youths are better in driving the cultural diversity. She said they can use their greatest force, which is social media to promote multilingual education and peace in the country while also suggesting that a national policy meeting should be held on how to implement it and standardising Nigerian languages
Meanwhile, Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education, Prof. Akpama Iboro, during the celebration at the ministry of education, said “Literacy in a multilingual world transcends the ability to read and write in a single language; it encompasses the rich tapestry of cultural diversity and linguistic heritage that characterises our nation and the world at large.”
Prof. Iboro affirmed the Clcommission’s commitment to promoting literacy, acknowledging the challenges of multilingual education in a country with numerous spoken languages.
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