Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education in Nigeria: Attitudes and Practice

Abstract

Although Nigeria's National Policy on Education provides for a multilingual policy involving the learning of a child's L1 or language of the immediate community (LIC), one of the three major or national languages (i.e. Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) and English, this policy has not been effectively implemented. This paper reviews the problems and challenges of bilingual education in Nigeria and suggests ways in which bilingual programmes may be implemented successfully in the country to the maximum benefit of the students and the entire nation. To determine the attitude of students, teachers, parents and administrators towards bilingual education, the study solicited the responses of 1000 participants from five different states. The results show that the respondents preferred education in both English and the mother tongue (MT) and were not positively disposed to the use of only one of them. It is also interesting that a majority of the respondents wanted the use of the MT beyond the first three years of primary education.

Parents’, Teachers’ and Students’ Beliefs about the Use and Study of Mother-tongue in the Secondary Schools in Akinyele Local Government Area, Oyo State, Nigeria

“…Thus, they have no patience to wait for the indigenous languages to develop like English which has existed since the colonial times and is spoken in many parts of the world. However, it is also possible that parents would prefer a bilingual education in which both English and the indigenous languages are used in schools, a claim already reported in Igboanusi (2008) and Amadi (2012).…”

Youtube and Second Life for Indigenous Language Learning: Awareness and Usage in Tertiary Education in Nigeria

“…This neglect appears to be worse for languages spoken by Nigeria's minority language families. While scholars have proffered several reasons for this untoward pattern, Igboanusi (2008) pointed out that inadequate teachers of many minority languages (where such languages are developed) is the main reason for the poor use of indigenous language in tertiary education.…”

“…However, to the researcher's knowledge, most research in indigenous language pedagogy in Nigeria has focused on policy, practice (e.g. Bamgbose, 2004), attitude, and practice (Igboanusi, 2008) and language teacher training (Emenanjo, 1995). In an exploratory parallel study, Epepe (2019) advocated for the use of YouTube and SL in promoting Nigerian languages literacy.…”

An Investigation into the Attitudes and Practices of Nigerian Students towards the Use of English Language and Their Native Languages in a Culturally Diverse Society

“…Politics, geographical spread and numerical strength contributed to such language grouping. It is a fact that many minority languages in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world are at high risk of extinction in the near future, as they are endangered because of persistent changes and/or increases in socio-economic and political developments that fail to provide a level playing ground for minority languages to compete favourably with other languages (Adegbite, 2003;Igboanusi, 2008;Akande & Salami, 2010;Borghetti & Beaven, 2017;Yee & Chan, 2018).…”