Mother tongue education is a cause for concern in many places of the world, including Botswana. This paper paints a picture of what is happening in Botswana with regard to mother tongue education and other places in the world and what Botswana can emulate, adopt, or adapt. This is important to enable Botswana to set the ball rolling in the right direction regarding the teaching of minority languages in schools and their inclusion in socio-economic and political spheres of life. The Botswana Government recognizes the existence of mother tongue languages and agrees that they should be taught in schools, yet mother tongue education has become a mere talk and only Setswana (national language) and English (official language) are taught in schools. We advocate and reiterate the urgent need for a comprehensive language reform in education policy in Botswana to cater for diversity and multiculturalism.

This mixed questionnaire survey sought to determine if lecturers who learned to speak and understand Nigerian Creole before English are willing to use the language as medium of instruction. The respondents were comprised of 560 lecturers and graduate students (i.e. master’s, doctoral) selected through a purposeful random sampling frame from 15 public institutions of higher learning in Nigeria. Lecturers declined to use Nigerian Creole as medium of instruction because they feared that its use might negatively affect their students’ learning of English. Graduate students indicated willingness to receive instruction through a combination of English and Nigerian Creole because they perceived the use of Nigerian Creole as fun and representative of the voice of a new generation of Nigerians. The sample reported that prior knowledge of Nigerian Creole does not facilitate the learning of English because both languages are too different to facilitate a transfer of learning.

This qualitative-dominant mixed study used content analysis, interviews, and survey to examine if first-year university undergraduates taking English language academic writing courses consider prior knowledge from high school English language five-paragraph essay writing style helpful. Sample included 67 first year university undergraduates. All the 67 students considered prior knowledge of the high school five-paragraph essay writing style helpful. They believed that it facilitated a transfer of learning in the first-year university undergraduate academic writing course. However, only 15 out of the respondents, who reported that prior knowledge of the high school English language five-paragraph essay writing style was helpful, also reported that they are level-appropriate competent in the first-year university undergraduate English language academic writing courses after one academic year. As such, essay-writing in high school offers students some foundation-knowledge to succeed in academic writing in universities. Further findings showed that students often delve into essay or academic writing without proper planning. Thus, it is recommended that universities introduce a bridge course specifically to address academic deficiency in reading and writing for all first year undergraduates upon admission into the university.

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