Legislating Mother Tongue Education in Ghana.

Abstract

Language is a critical element in education in every society. Ghana has witnessed numerous language policies since colonial times. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to legislate language use in school, especially after independence. The difficulty has been deciding on the roles of each of the over 80 indigenous Ghanaian languages and English. As a result, different governments have had different positions on the issue leading to frequent changes in policy. The situation has serious implications for teaching and learning in basic schools. Education committee reports and language policy related material constituted our main source of data. We employed content analysis as our methodology. It was discovered that the lack of a strong language policy legislation has been a major cause of the frequent policy changes in language education in Ghana. In order to sustain an effective language policy in education, it was proposed that government must have the will to legislate language policy which will properly define the roles of each language in school. Such a legislation should provide for an implementation plan with distinct benchmarks.