Mother-Tongue Education Policy: Effects on Children’s Achievement in Reading Skills

Abstract

Researches have shown that instructions received in the mother tongue are easily assimilated and permanent than those received in a second or foreign language. The thrust of this paper is to investigate on the effect of the mother tongue education policy on Nigeria children’s achievement in reading skills. The study adopted the randomized pre-test experimental and control group as design. Three research questions were used as a guide to the study. Two hypotheses were also raised for the study at 0.05 level of significance. The sample consisted of 215 primary 3 pupils taken from 4 primary schools in two geo-political zones. The sample size consisted of 110 pupils from rural and 105 pupils from urban schools. Standard deviation, means and analyses of covariance were used to analyze the data. The results indicates that children in the rural schools taught in the mother-tongue performed better than those from urban schools who were taught in English Language in reading skills. From the findings, it is recommended that the language policy on mother tongue usage should be enforced as medium of instruction in the early primary schools years.

Keywords: Mother-tongue, policy, achievement and reading skills.