RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT
Monday, 26 November 2012
Friday, 23 November 2012
RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT POSITION PAPER
GOVERNMENT OF RIVERS
STATE OF NIGERIA
Rivers State Readers Project
www.riversstate-readersproject.blogspot.com
Our Ref: RSRP/CD/Vol.1/2 |
Block ‘C’ 5th
Floor Room 513
Secretariat Complex
P.M.B. 5098
Port Harcourt, NIGERIA
Date: 28 June 2011
|
POSITION PAPER ON
INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE EDUCATION
I. PREAMBLE
The Federal Government has approved
orthographies of fourteen (14) Rivers State languages. The fourteen (14) languages
are now nationally accredited as “Nigerian languages spoken in Rivers State”, viz:
Abuan,
Degema, Echie, Egbema, Egene, Ekpeye, Eleme, Gokana, Ibani, Kana, Ndoni, Odual,
Ogba, and Okrika. They were
published by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council
(NERDC) Sheda, Abuja, in volumes IX and X of the ORTHOGRAPHIES OF NIGERIAN LANGUAGES MANUAL.
(Ikwere, Kalabari and Obolo had been approved earlier, bringing the number
of ratified indigenous languages in Rivers State to seventeen [17]).
II. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POSITION
The Federal Government said:
The National Council on Education
has approved the use of these orthographies. Therefore, the orthographies were
ratified as standardized systems of writing of these languages with the
ultimate aim of stimulating the production of materials to be used in schools
for reading, writing, literature and learning.
The development of the orthographies
of the fourteen languages of Rivers State by the Rivers State Readers Project
(RSRP) with the technical partnership of the Nigerian Educational Research and
Development Council (NERDC) is an outstanding effort aimed at language
standardization and development.
The
Rivers State Readers Project (RSRP) in its proactive approach to the
development of indigenous languages conceived and executed the project for the
development of orthographies of the 14 languages and their respective
curriculum. The NERDC as a regulatory body not only applauded these efforts,
but complimented them technically and facilitated their ratification.
NERDC
encourages state governments and relevant agencies to take up the challenge of
developing their indigenous languages to meet the requirements of the National
Policy on Education (NPE) for educational growth and overall development. In
these regards, the Rivers State Readers Project is outstanding. It is a
continuation of the pioneering giant stride by Late Professor Kay Williamson of
blessed memory.
Rivers
State, by this development, has adopted the UNESCO statements of recognition of
languages and multilingualism as essential to the eradication of extreme poverty
and
hunger,
achieving universal basic education, responding to HIV/AIDS/Malaria,
environmental sustainability and enjoyment of human rights.
The National Council on Education, which is made up of the Minister of
Education and the Commissioners of Education of the 36 States of the federation,
formally approved these orthographies, giving credence to the technical and
professional expertise of the work.
III. LANGUAGE EDUCATION LAW IN RIVERS STATE
Founded in 1970 as the Rivers Readers Project, the Project
became moribund until a new board was inaugurated in 2008 to take up the
challenge of developing the seventeen (17) recognized Rivers State languages
for Federal Government approval and use in the Rivers State school system as
well as general communication.
The re-establishment
of the Rivers State Readers Project in 2008 was empowered by “The
Rivers State Education (Teaching of Indigenous Languages) Law 2003” which
provides that:
“The teaching of indigenous
languages is made compulsory in all pre-primary, primary, and junior secondary
schools in Rivers State. The Ministry of Education shall ensure that the
teaching of these indigenous languages forms part of the academic curricula of
all the affected schools.
The Ministry shall cause the local
languages to be one of the subjects examined at the end of each term or year in
the First School Leaving Certificate (FSLC) and the Junior Secondary School Certificate
(JSSC) examinations. The
Ministry of Education shall ensure that teachers are trained to cater for all
the schools through workshops and compressed certificate courses on local
languages spoken in the State in universities or other institutions approved by
the Ministry.”
We do
sincerely appreciate and applaud the efforts of the Governor Amaechi
Administration in resuscitating the Rivers
State Readers Project to its current enviable national and
international status. The profile of the Rivers State Readers Project
continues to blossom as evidenced by the commendations by the Federal
Government above, and more importantly, internationally, we are happy to
confirm that:
“The
Rivers State Readers Project was listed / cited in the 2010 International
Journal on ‘Evidence- and Practice-based Advocacy Brief’ published by
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg, Germany. It ranked 2nd
to Professor Aliyu Fafunwa’s Yoruba language ‘Six-Year Primary (Ife
Mother-tongue Education Project) carried out at the Obafemi Awolowo University,
Ile-Ife.’ None other was chosen out of the scores of language projects across
the country, Nigeria, reported by the Federal Ministry of Education. This is an
international recognition of the efforts of the Rivers State Readers Project.”
IV. FURTHER JUSTIFICATIONS
FOR INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE EDUCATION
Speaking
with great foresight, in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War as the Federal
Commissioner of Education in 1971, Chief
A.Y. Eke said: “The next
cardinal principle which ought to govern our education is character-training
about which much has been said by so many in recent times and especially in
these days when it has become fashionable for many a school child to be
violent, irresponsible and disrespectful. Character-training (through the
mother-tongue should at home and school include) moral and civic values.” (The parenthesis is mine).
The
reason for his policy advocacy was that pre-Civil War education system in
Nigeria had a measure of observation of youth character in the forms of
integrity, rectitude, good initiative, discipline, respect for constituted
authority, etc. After the War, with the advent of the military, these values
disappeared leading up to examinations fraud, very poor standard of education,
cultism, armed violence, kidnapping, restiveness, and pervasive corruption,
etc. Bad character traits like stealing, lying, truancy, immorality,
dishonesty, etc need to be tackled by the re-introduction of traditional values
via early mother-tongue education.
The out-come
of the 2009 Garden City Literary Festival held in Port Harcourt in
October 2009 is seen roundly as an advocacy for mother-tongue education in
Rivers State and the Nigerian nation. The guest speaker, Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (the international literary icon), renewed
his earlier prescription for creative writers in Africa to write in their
mother-tongue as he has chosen to do in his native Gikuyu language (of
Kenya). He lamented the adverse effect the English Language has had on many
writers who are unable to write in their mother-tongue as demonstrated by a
writing test he conducted at the Port Harcourt event. He holds the view that
perception between languages has nothing to do with the inherent powers of
languages but that such thinking has been brought about by a historical process
– colonial history to be precise.
Professor
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o shares the same concerns with the UNESCO about the low
utilization of our indigenous languages in our national life. The current
UNESCO Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura (a Japanese), pointed out that the
death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible
cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral
expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs
and jokes. He said the loss of languages is also detrimental to humanity’s
grasp of biodiversity, as they transmit much knowledge about nature and the
universe.
The situation in Nigeria, it has been observed, is
that we have a generation that is neither proficient in their mother-tongue nor
in the English language, which is akin to moving towards a zero language option
(pidgin?). The reason being that we are scandalized by the practice in primary
schools which punishes one child for speaking in mother-tongue, and extols the
other for speaking in English. The humiliation and negativity attached to
native languages in the teaching/learning process by the so-called educated
elites, indigenous language development skeptics and some education policy
makers should be done away with. This is because the positive affirmation of
English language as a means of intellectual productivity and the (pervasive)
criminalization of mother-tongue for the same process has, for long, been the
bane of development of these languages.
The lead speaker at the 2009 Garden City Literary Festival
sees this as an obscurantist colonial hang-over and as such there is the urgent need to change the status quo so that
our indigenous languages will be the language of commerce, administration,
politics, education, industry, jurisprudence and international communication.
This is the lesson of Ngugi’s postulations. It is a call for linguistic pride
and nationalism. And the way out of this linguistic suicide is to
start using our own languages as the medium of instruction in our nursery and
primary schools.
The
2009 Garden City Literary Festival, which was sponsored by our own Governor
Amaechi, a lover of literary excellence, applauded the nationally
recognized and internationally uncontroverted “Ife experiment” conducted by the Late Professor Aliyu
Babatunde Fafunwa, using his Yoruba mother-tongue to teach children from
primary one to six, which showed that the pupils did quite well. Since then,
Fafunwa had argued on the possibility of teaching
mathematics
and science subjects in our indigenous languages since his experience at the “Ife-six-year primary project” showed
clearly that children will cope better with mathematics if they are taught in
their mother-tongue.
In
summarizing the out-come of the 2009 Literary Festival, the lead speaker
asserts that there is nothing wrong in using our local languages to teach from
nursery to university level. Such languages can be further enriched through
extensive borrowing as done by English to make up for their deficiencies and
inadequacies. He suggested that all our classic creative works, especially
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Soyinka’s Death and the
Kings Horseman, and others, should be translated into these languages to
boost them. (ref Daily Sun
newspaper, 30/10/2009).
Professor
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was not alone in his advocacy. His international outcry was
echoed nationally in Nigeria by the chairman,
board of directors of the publishing house, Dr Lekan Are, who lamented that the
failures being recorded now in the various examinations (WAEC, NECO, JAMB, etc)
were unheard of way back when children only came in contact with the foreign
language when they were six years old and above. Dr Are, therefore, canvassed
that children be taught their mother-tongue to a certain age before they became
exposed to a foreign language as the only panacea to the children's learning
problems.
He also
blamed children's inability to speak their mother-tongue on parents, who think
it elitist for their children to speak only in English rather than their
mother-tongue. Children coming in contact with a foreign language from age six
and above would enhance rather than hinder their cognitive abilities, and even
hasten their understanding of the foreign language.
Dr Lekan
Are was joined in his clarion call by the foremost linguist and Yoruba author,
Professor Akinwunmi Isola, who stated that unless a child was competent in the
mother-tongue he might not be able to acquire a foreign language. He noted that
Nigerian children who presumed to speak only foreign language were the worse
users of the English language. He
also tied mother-tongue to the acquisition of culture and values because
language is the vehicle through which these two are conveyed or transmitted. He
said we have abandoned our mother-tongue, albeit it is through the
mother-tongue that you can acquire culture and values. Culture comes first
through our language. (ref Guardian Newspaper, 29/6/09).
The
presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria also lent its voice to this
policy direction. Our late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua launched the Microsoft
Language Localization Programme in Abuja in June 2009 and described language as
strategic to national development. He called on Nigerians to take advantage of the
opportunities provided by Microsoft's local language programme to preserve and
promote the country's mother languages, “while benefiting from continuing IT
advancements." Microsoft Nigeria had proved that language couldn't be a
barrier to technology access.
By far the
greatest advocate of the development and use of mother-tongue was and still
remains the UNESCO. It was UNESCO that commissioned and co-funded with Ford
Foundation the research that identified the 17 recognized languages of Rivers
State in 1970. And recently, in 2006, Hubert J. Charles, UNESCO’s then Country
Representative in Nigeria said:
“We
must… understand the term ‘language’ in its fullest sense. {Citing a renowned
anthropologist, Davis} UNESCO notes that: “A language isn’t just a body of
vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, a
vehicle through which the soul of a particular culture comes into the material
world. When we lose a language we lose a
vital
part of the human spirit. English … enjoys considerable support from parents
and teachers in the belief that it is an important door to modernism and
success. That the ability to speak English in our globalized world constitutes
an advantage is neither in doubt nor being challenged.
What is
certainly not true is that knowledge and use of one or even two indigenous
languages militates against one being able to master English or French. In
fact, the view espoused by UNESCO holds that mastery of these Western languages
is more often than not facilitated by mastery of one’s indigenous language.
Educators, particularly at the pre- and primary school levels, will need to be
careful that they are not seen as having lost the argument that the use and
mastery of the mother-tongue actually assists in the acquisition of English,
French and other Western languages.”
The TIME
international magazine of July 1977 had raised an alarm, saying that: “Half the world’s languages are faced with
extinction … unless we wake up to the problem, we stand to lose up to 95% of
our languages in the coming century. Indigenous peoples are not waiting for the
slow death of linguistic extinction. They are speaking out to try to save their
endangered tongues.” And just recently on Thursday, 3/6/11 we read the editorial
of ThisDay Newspaper applauding Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State for “canvassing the revival of Igbo language and
tradition (and urging) other governors to take a cue from Governor Obi’s good
example. Beyond teaching or learning the local language in schools, parents
should make efforts to communicate with their children in their mother tongue
at home. A local language that is not spoken, sooner or later dies… the native
tongue of a person expresses his or her essence and (cultural) identity.”
The
criticality of mother-tongue as a matter of life and death was decisively demonstrated
by no less a powerful national army than the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). In “Operation
Thunder: The Entebbe Raid, Israelis’ Own Story”, Yehuda
Ofer (1976:121,124) a military journalist said:
“The fighters who had burst into
the hall shouted warnings in Hebrew
to the captives to lie on the ground and they then wiped out the Palestinian
Arab terrorists in the hall within a few seconds with crackling volleys of
automatic fire… Those who hugged the floor were not hit. The (Israeli)
covering force succeeded in that very moment in silencing the firing from the
tower and the first of the hostages began to emerge from the doorway of the
terminal to race to the awaiting aircraft.” Those who did not understand Hebrew
perished in “seconds.”
Suffice
it, therefore, to re-echo the wise words of one of Africa’s foremost linguists,
Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose (1993) that: “When all is said and done, the fate of the endangered language may well
lie in the hands of the owners of the language themselves and in their will to
make it survive.” This is more so because as Samuel Johnson has
lamented: “I am always sorry when any
language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.”
V. WAY FORWARD
We
believe the future is very bright for the development and deployment of our indigenous
language skills in the Rivers State school system and general communication as
strongly advocated by UNESCO and the Federal Government of Nigeria. In fact,
Urhobo and Efik are now being written in NECO along with Ibo, Hausa &
Yoruba. We believe some Rivers languages will join soon as we develop the
curriculum in technical collaboration with NERDC!
The
Rivers State Readers Project has continued to work on this project with a view
to addressing the 5 distinct segments of the Project, namely: the orthography
development / deployment, curricula development, writing of language books,
training of language teachers and deployment of language teachers to use the
materials to teach in the schools. And we were committed to kick-starting all
the segments of the Project in the typical “project management critical path network style.” We were working on the orthographies and advancing
towards the curricula development and book writing when we reached an agreement
with the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education on training of the teachers.
After a careful review of our proposed course content and course description,
the Vice-Chancellor of UOE replied in the affirmative. Similarly, the Rivers
State Universal Basic Education Board was working in tandem with us on the
prospects of training and deployment of teachers in the school system.
For the development of the curricula, NERDC officially
confirmed that:
“The development of language curricula
is the responsibility of NERDC through her Language Development Centre with
State governments as collaborators and partners. All stages of the language
curriculum development process i.e. Planning, Writing, Critique, Editorial,
presentation to Joint Consultative Committee on Education (JCCE) and the
National Council on Education (NCE) shall be facilitated by NERDC with input
from the Rivers State Government through the Rivers State Readers Project
office. The Rivers State Government as collaborator shall fund the project
fully. Upon receiving NCE approval for the curricula, the Rivers State
Government shall print and distribute the curricula for use in schools in the
state. Proposals detailing the curriculum development processes and stages and
cost implications for each stage” have been forwarded already.
Government
has recently assured us of its support for the development of our mother-tongue;
the bedrock of our pristine cultural heritage, moral values, positive
traditional ethos and socio-economic development as symbolized by the Rivers
State annual cultural carnival (CARNIRIV), which is actually an adjunct to the
development of our indigenous languages - the foundation of the people’s
cultural heritage.
To mark
the official take-off of the matching of our giant strides in educational
infrastructure and cultural development with an even stronger commitment to the
development of our Rivers State indigenous language heritage, which is the lasting
foundation for socio-economic development, let the Rivers State Readers Project
fivefold cycle (of orthography deployment,
curricula development, writing of language books, training of language teachers
and deployment of language teachers to use the materials to teach in the
schools) commence full swing.
TONY ENYIA; PhD, MNIM
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY /CEO RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT
12th AUGUST, 2011.
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY /CEO RIVERS STATE READERS PROJECT
12th AUGUST, 2011.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)