SCHOOL KIDS REJECT AFRICAN LANGUAGES
Pregs Govender

The Sunday Times
November 8 2008

The overwhelming majority of SA's school pupils are not interested enough in indigenous African languages to study them at school.

It has emerged that an increasing number of black children at English-medium schools are opting for Afrikaans as an additional language, even though they have the choice of an African language.

The latest statistics from the Department of Education show that out of the 590000 pupils writing matric this year, 113902 will write Afrikaans as an additional language, compared with only 12 723 who chose one of the nine African languages available in the school curriculum. The vast majority, or 491104, have chosen English as an additional language.

Of those who chose additional African languages, 9756 chose Zulu, 1584 Xhosa, 679 Sotho, 9 Ndebele, 356 Pedi, 179 Tswana, 114 Swati, 14 Venda and 32 Tsonga.

Only 1023 coloured, white and Indian pupils registered for an indigenous African language. Of the 488786 African pupils sitting for the examination, 71963 chose Afrikaans as an additional language.

African languages were introduced in the curriculum after all indigenous South African languages became official in 1997. Efforts were made to give all languages equal status and children were encouraged to learn to speak the languages of others.

Many who chose an African language as a subject already spoke it at home and preferred to study English as their first language. Experts maintain this is because they believe there is no need to study a language that they already speak fluently.

Penny Vinjevold, deputy director-general for further education and training, said the department should look at why a disproportionate number of pupils still chose Afrikaans.

"We would like to see more pupils studying African languages. We would want to look at how we can encourage that," she said.

But principals warn that a shortage of African language teachers at primary schools, as well as a perception that African languages are difficult to learn, could sound the death knell for these languages in high schools.

Some teachers have openly discouraged those who don't speak African languages at home from studying them at school, because the grammar is very complex.

Johannesburg's Greenside High School principal Nicola Whyte said a big concern was that a subject as important as Zulu was being downplayed at primary schools.

"Then you are going to have even fewer pupils taking the subject (in high school). Another problem is that teachers are scarce and they are poached by private schools."

Gauteng education MEC Angie Motshekga admitted that her department had not encouraged pupils to study African languages. She said more pupils studied Afrikaans because of the availability of teachers and reading material.

Limpopo's education MEC, Aaron Motsoaledi, said black parents still strongly favoured English over other languages. "Many parents are stupidly excited about how well their children speak English. They proudly display them at funerals to read obituaries," he said.

North West education spokesman Charles Raseala said Tswana, the province's most-spoken language, was so unpopular in schools that some schools in townships had been turned into English-medium schools, where African pupils chose to study English and Afrikaans instead.

"When children from former Model C schools visit the rural villages where their parents were born, you still find parents who are proud to tell the elders: 'No, you can't talk to my child in Tswana, she doesn't hear you. She only speaks English.' "

Matlhodi Teu, the director of whole-school development in the North West Department of Education, said most parents and pupils in the province believed that studying Tswana "was not beneficial to them".

Professor Wannie Carstens, director of the school of languages at North West University, said Afrikaans was indeed the easier option.

"The verb forms in Afrikaans are much easier to learn as well as the pronouns, nouns and adverbs. At least 80% of the vocabulary in Afrikaans is also much simpler."

Carstens said that, for those whose home language was either English or Afrikaans, African languages were more difficult to learn because they were unrelated.