UN Chronicle | Ensuring Children Complete Primary Schooling: Protecting the World's Languages

Ensuring Children Complete Primary Schooling: Protecting the World's Languages
By Alfred Capelle

Article

Many of the world's languages today are dying and many are considered endangered. They die when their oldest living speakers pass away.

Where are the children and grandchildren of these speakers? Generally, they are alive and well, but are speaking some other language they learned in schools where their parents sent them, because they thought it would open doors to getting good jobs and making a better living. In the rush to adopt this language of perceived opportunity, they neglected the language of their home community, never learned to read or write it and eventually found they could not even remember how to speak it. They also neglected learning how to fish and hunt, grow crops, sing and dance, or talk about things in the old way. In joining the modern world, they had left the old world behind, unable to return even if they had wanted to.

UNESCO Photo

What we see here is the downside of westernization and modernization. But is it inevitable? I think not. There are ways to soften its effect and make our children capable of living happily in both worlds. I will mention here three that are closely interrelated. The first is bilingual education, which helps students learn to read and write the language they have heard from birth—the language of their home community—while also learning the world language that offers wider opportunities. The insight thereby gained in the relation between letters and sounds of the language they know well is then easily transferred to the reading and writing of the world language learnt in school. They are enabled to become ambidextrous in languages as it were—one might say, "ambi-lingual".

There is another element to bilingual education that goes beyond the teaching of reading and writing in two languages. Students need to learn to use the home language in dealing with western things and concepts. Equally important, they need to learn to talk in world language about all the activities of daily living in their home communities, and the old ways of getting a living from the land and the sea. They should also learn to use either language in any situation, so that they can feel equally at home in their home communities and in the world community, and be in a position to have something to offer to both.

It sounds easy enough, but why isn't it done more often? There is a negative attitude that stands in the way, one that is commonly held about bilingual education and multilingualism generally. The idea—the fallacy—is that the human brain can hold just one language well and that any space given to another will crowd out something from the main one, or that they will interfere with each other.

However, this idea has no basis in fact. If the truth be known, most people in the world know at least two languages, and know them well. Look at the membership of the United Nations. Monolingual speakers are definitely in the minority, and they are at a disadvantage in dealing with the modern world, having others to translate for them in many situations where they could cope better if they knew both languages themselves. Truly educated people are multilingual, and modern studies show that the human brain is capable of dealing well with the full vocabularies of several languages without mixing them in any way. Its limits in this regard are still not known. All that is necessary is the proper conditions for learning each language.

The third requirement for preserving the world's languages is the wherewithal. It takes well-trained teachers, as well as well-financed schools, to carry out programmes of bilingual education. And this is where the United Nations can help especially.

The UN should do what it could to focus more attention on the human and national institution capacity-building effort and the financial support provided by such UN agencies as the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to the local national educational systems with the more vulnerable languages, in particular those of small island developing States.

The aim is to improve these education systems in implementing bilingual education and develop and retain the native languages while also improving the teaching of the world language. This is very instrumental in solving all other social problems that the United Nations is trying to eradicate through such forms as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

These UN agencies would do better also if they utilized their resources to mount a concerted public relations campaign to instil positive attitudes toward bilingualism everywhere. Bilingual education cannot flourish without strong support from enlightened parents in each home community. And the United Nations can and should help.

Studies involving sophisticated brain-imaging technologies called functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, have revealed some intriguing patterns in the way the brain processes first and second languages.

Native and second languages are spatially separated in Broca's area, which is a region in the frontal lobe of the brain that is responsible for the motor parts of language movement of the mouth, tongue and palate. In contrast, the two languages show very little separation in the activation of Wernicke's area-an area of the brain in the posterior part of the temporal lobe-which is responsible for comprehension of language.
Source: How the Brain Learns a Second Language, www.brainconnection.com

Biography

Ambassador Alfred Capelle is the Permanent Representative of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to the United Nations. Prior to this assignment, he was President of the College of the Marshall Islands and a Marshallese Language Consultant.

New Study Finds Teacher Shortage Caused by Poor Working Conditions

Population growth and declining working conditions are creating a severe shortage of teachers across the globe that may lead to a slide in education standards, according to a new global study by the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

The study found that during the 1990s the number of school-aged children outpaced the growth in the number of teachers worldwide, packing classrooms in some developing countries with as many as 100 students per teacher.

At the same time, the study reveals that deteriorating working conditions and low salaries in the industrialized nations are discouraging new recruits to the profession, creating shortages and threatening to diminish the quality of education at a time when the need for new knowledge and skills is growing dramatically.

The report notes that the number of female teachers increased throughout the decade, but they still remain well under half the total in many countries where the presence of more female teachers could help increase the access of girls to schooling. In addition, women remain under-represented, often severely, in educational management positions, providing further evidence that the "glass ceiling" persists in education.

Developed countries are also facing a difficult future. The teaching force as a whole is ageing, and Governments are battling to attract young people to the profession. Research indicates that low salaries may be partly responsible for the lack of new recruits. In donor countries, for example, a teacher with 15 years experience earns an average of $27,525 annually—significantly less than equally qualified professionals in other fields.

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