This is a Childs native language. It is expected to be L1 of the child.

Why is the mother tongue important?

  1. It facilitate better understanding and it enalisation of concepts and promotes continuity in their thinking.
  2. The early use of mother tongue will facilitate the person’s expression of intelligence, capacity and adaptability.
    NPE stipulates that the language of instruction should be the language of environment or mother tongue till the end of Primary 3.
    The mother tongue is not easily able to go into extinction.

Disadvantages of mother tongue
As describe as the policy statement there are some technical and pedagogical problems associated with the use of mother tongues as medium of instruction.
Some of the disadvantages are:

  1. Few natural languages have developed orthography for writing them.
  2. Very few of the languages have textbooks written in them.
  3. There are sometimes conceptual problems resulting from the difference in the mode of thought, in Nigerian Language and English.

To solve some of these problems the government will need to:

  1. Develop the orthography of many more Nationalized languages.
  2. Publish textbooks in Nationalized language.
  3. Have educational graduates become linguists.