NCDC tasks govt with funding language boards

The director of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), Grace Baguma, has asked the Government to start funding language boards in order to facilitate teaching of mother tongue in primary schools.

Baguma said the move will aid the preservation of the languages, some of which are on the verge of extinction.

"It pains me to see some languages, such as Pokot, almost getting extinct. It hurts that some people are not able to speak their mother tongue because they think English is better," Baguma says.

The 2007 national language policy established District Language Boards to promote the use of the local languages in primary schools, to improve literacy.

"The boards need money to develop orthography, and monitor the progress of the mother tongue language teaching on a regular basis," Baguma says.

Orthography specifies a standardised way of using a specific system or script to write the language. It is an alphabetical order in which letters of each language are arranged.

The boards comprise of District Education Officers or the District Inspector of Schools, chairpersons of education committees, parents, and teachers.

Baguma made the remarks on Friday last week, at the Speke Hotel in Kampala, during the closure of a four-day book versioning and translating exercise. The exercise was organised by the Reading Association of Uganda (RAU) and Room to Read.

Harrison Kiggundu, the chairperson of RAU, said they partnered with Room to Read and translated 120 storybooks written in English and versioned them for the Ugandan local languages.

"The books, which have been translated to Luganda and Runyakore-Rukiga, will be delivered to public schools to help improve literacy levels in Uganda," Kiggundu said.

Some of the translated books include We are Weaving, Crocodiles in the Rain and Dogs Day.

"The translated and adapted titles will be evaluated by NCDC, content approved, printed into books and freely distributed to schools and community libraries in the country," Kiggundu said.

He said the two languages are for purposes of piloting and that books in more languages would be produced when funds are available.

Prosperous Nankindu, the state minister for education in the Buganda Kingdom, said teaching children the local language gives them a sense of identity, to accept and be proud of their heritage and culture.

Buganda is one of the areas with the most active language boards, but are self-funding.

The assistant commissioner in charge of primary education, Tony Mukasa-Lusambu, said reading is the key for learning and that it is important for children to learn reading their local language.

Although Uganda is implementing the thematic curriculum, where teachers are expected to use a familiar area language as the medium of instruction for lower primary, some schools have abandoned teaching in the local language.

"Many language boards are non-functional. We are making the government know the importance of language boards, which can help us implement the curriculum," Lusambu said.

He said the government is committed to making it possible for teachers to conduct lessons in the local language, through provision of the materials.

"No child should be punished for speaking their local language. They need English, but the local language is more important, especially in the lower classes," Lusambu said.

Uganda is a multi-lingual country, with about 40 local languages.

The Government, through a series of policies, has sought to promote local languages in education. Article 6 of Uganda's Constitution, for example, says any language may be used as a medium of instruction in schools or other educational institutions.

The government White Paper on Education for the National Integration and Development (1992) states that local languages should be used as the medium of instruction in all education programmes, up to Primary Four.

However, inadequate resources and ineffective implementation strategies have hampered efforts to put the policies into practice.