Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education in Nigeria: Attitudes and Practice

Although Nigeria's National Policy on Education provides for a multilingual policy involving the learning of a child's L1 or language of the immediate community (LIC), one of the three major or national languages (i.e. Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) and English, this policy has not been effectively implemented. This paper reviews the problems and challenges of bilingual education in Nigeria and suggests ways in which bilingual programmes may be implemented successfully in the country to the maximum benefit of the students and the entire nation. To determine the attitude of students, teachers, parents and administrators towards bilingual education, the study solicited the responses of 1000 participants from five different states. The results show that the respondents preferred education in both English and the mother tongue (MT) and were not positively disposed to the use of only one of them. It is also interesting that a majority of the respondents wanted the use of the MT beyond the first three years of primary education. Keywords: bilingual educationeducation policyNigeriaeducational reformattitudeslanguage preference in education Notes 1. In the sense used in this work, MT refers to the home language or any language to which a child is first exposed. 2. While the three major languages are recognised by the NPE as 'national languages', the term 'minority languages' is often used to refer to all the other indigenous languages used in the country in spite of the fact that the population of their speakers ranges from sometimes less than ten to over a million people. 3. The survey is part of a larger ongoing study on language-in-education policy in Nigeria. 4. Arabic is used as L1 in some parts of Bornu state by the Shuwa Arabs.