African language learning requires teacher retraining

"The new policy is excellent in that it will help promote multilingualism and foster social cohesion, as the government intends," said Molteno's CEO, Masennya Dikotla. "However, unless teachers are properly trained in how to teach an additional African language, we could be setting learners up for failure."

Despite the National Education Evaluation Development Unit's recent caution that there is a shortage of teachers, Dikotla said that he believes that the government can make use of existing teachers to do the job.

"The issue that we then face regards the retraining of teachers, although this should not be a problem given the presence of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). It is just a matter of refocusing and retooling them."

For many years now, NGOs like Molteno have been working with the government on various aspects of improving literacy. For Molteno, in particular, a major emphasis of its work is on training primary school teachers.

A specific skill that needs to be acquired

"Our coaches, who are trained separately from teachers who they later train, are taught basic skills in how to teach children to read - which is a specific skill that needs to be acquired," he said. "Just because you can read or speak a language, does not mean that you are skilled to teach it effectively."

The training is done by means of workshops in individual schools, after which professional learning groups are formed for further coaching and support. "These groups are highly effective as they enable teachers from different schools to share best practice."

After teacher training, coaches visit individual teachers in their classrooms to provide further assistance and upskilling. "It is important to emphasise that we do not monitor their performance from an evaluation point of view," noted Dikotla. "Our sole mandate is to support the teacher with the goal of improving learner performance in the classroom."

Dikotla said that the importance of training teachers to teach an African language with skill and proficiency cannot be overstated, particularly when children are not learning in their home language.

At present, most children receiving instruction in a language other than their mother tongue already struggle to understand any of the subjects they are being taught.

"Research shows that if the medium of instruction is not the home language, learning problems accumulate in all subjects and chances of dropping out increase. Also, pupils are quicker to learn to read and acquire other academic skills when first taught in their mother tongue."

Therefore, said Dikotla, if yet another language is introduced without the correct support by the teacher, this could just add to the confusion many of them already experience.

"Additional language learning is less likely to succeed unless these pupils receive extra assistance from skilled teachers," he concluded. "We need to focus on retraining teachers as a matter of urgency."