Matrics Reject African Languages

08.11.08

Article by: Prega Govender, Sunday Times Published: Nov 08, 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. 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.” 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.

For full text go to: http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=880423

Should all parents be encouraging more African language learning by their children? Is it sufficient that children are conversational but don't study African languages? Should we even bother to tackle this perception? Tell us what you think by submitting a comment below.