Mother Tongue: Key To Success At School

Research has shown that a child’s mother tongue is the optimal language for literacy and learning for children. For the young learners using the mother tongue ensures better understanding of the content and better attitude towards school in the early years of childhood. Learning one’s mother tongue is very crucial to a child’s overall development. It connects a child to his/her culture and at the same time ensures cognitive development as well as enhances a child’s ability to learn new languages.

The first comprehension of a child starts with the language he/she hears at home. That is the first language that a child learns to comprehend and it plays a very important role in framing and expressing one’s emotion. Mother tongue has a very deep connection with a child’s understanding not because a child hears it while growing up but a child automatically connects to it as these are the same sound that is familiar from the time a child is in the womb even before he/she is born. However, in India things took a different turn due to the long foreign rule. As a matter of fact today saving and learning our mother tongues should not be looked as a romance of the linguist but rather should be an agenda to save our languages and the dialects which have an amazing wealth of information accumulated in them. India is treasure trove of very rich and unique languages, unfortunately, in our country the education policy makers are quite unaware of the linguistic scenario and linguist who understand the crucial role are almost never consulted.

 By: Madhuchanda Saxena

 Content: http://www.indiatogether.org/how-mother-tongue-instruction-influences-education-education