Literacy in the Mother Tongue: Policy Versus Preference

Abstract

The Nigerian government has a policy that the language of instruction at the pre-primary and early levels of education in the country should be in the mother tongue or the language of the immediate environment. This research finds that the societal preference runs counter to the government policy. The data collected shows that most of the private schools teach all the subjects in English Language, as well as teaching English Language as a subject. None of them use either the Mother tongue (Igbo) or admixture of English and Igbo for teaching purposes. Teaching is done solely in English. It is instructive to note that 5 out of the 10 schools do not even teach Igbo Language at all, even as a subject, as they claim that they do not have 'competent' teachers to teach the subject. The other 5 private schools teach Igbo Language as a subject. The implication of the results of this study is that both the practice and preference of the identified  stakeholders/consumers in the education industry in Nigeria are at variance with the provision of the policy put in place by government. . This is quite surprising in view of the fact that there are monitoring sections at the respective supervising education offices, even at the local government levels. It appears the implementation of the NPE in terms of the language of instruction at the pre-primary/primary levels bother them less. The  result also showed that all the teachers in the private schools would prefer to teach their pupils in English Language. They did not subscribe to the provisions of the NPE at all. 75% of the population studied in the public schools shared the same preference with the teachers in the private schools, while only 5 of the 20 in the public schools (i.e.25%) only would prefer Igbo as the language of instruction.