Let's empower students to use mother language - World Vision Ghana

Students of Begoro Presbyterian Senior High School in the Fanteakwa North District of the Eastern Region have welcomed calls for Ghanaian Languages to be used on the floor of Parliaments as suggested by a member of Parliament.

The students who have acknowledged the importance of the use of local languages at the basic level and in schools during presentations by teachers believe the use will help broaden their understanding of issues.

The students made this appeal to the Ministry of Education to also intervene in the use of local languages in schools to the media on the sidelines of a debate competition organized for them by World Vision Ghana to commemorate this year's International Mother Language Day.

Ampadu Phillip Agyei the lead debater speaking to the media said: "We are losing some of our culture, yes, almost all as I indicated during the debate some games, food and a whole lot of things concerning our native language is being lost to Western culture. At least, I am adapting someone's language, like English language and French and some people, especially children and youth are losing their language, so I think maybe someone should take all the points we shared seriously that using local languages in schools will help preserve our culture.

"I'm a government student, we have been learning a lot about governance, government activism, most of the time about the parliament house, they allow us to watch and so I saw this parliament is sending this proposal that they will use their native language in the house, we also asked our teachers about it they explained that we have some communities and some constituencies that their members of Parliament have never spoken in the house and that too is not helping."

He added, "So I think when using the native language it helps you to express your views well and to that extent, we have to start from our basic level so we support the call for Parliament to adopt the use of local languages in the house and we will use this opportunity to also urge the Ghana Education Service to help implement it in our schools."

On her part, Vanessa Boateng-Okrah, the Reading Improvement and Skills Enhancement (RISE) Project Officer for World Vision Ghana in Fanteakwa, explaining the rationale behind the quiz competition expressed satisfaction about the impact.

"International Mother Language Day is purposely to create awareness and to sensitize the public and students in schools about our mother tongue and promote our mother tongue in our schools; we realize that most of our local languages are fading in schools and we don't even use this as a method of instruction when teaching," she said.

"So we want to revive that in schools, especially in the foundational level, like from KG1 to basic 3, that's why we are here, just to create more awareness and to celebrate this important day. What we have identified is that we don't use the mother tongue anymore and even in schools, when children speak their local language, some of them are reprimanded for speaking it and we feel like it's not ideal. We should promote our local languages and we would realize that some local languages are even going extinct so we want to keep them in the system, revive them, even to promote our cultural heritage and not let our cultural heritage fade away, just like that," she added.

"In conclusion, I support the proposal in Parliament and I would say that they should pass it because it's very important. I wouldn't like it if, for instance, Fanti or Ewe has to just fade away, just like that... so they should keep it and make sure that the law is passed on keeping our local languages in the schools."