Mother Tongue

Overview

All students are encouraged to take tuition in their mother tongue; this supports their overall literacy, cognitive success, and leads to better long term academic achievement.

Students mostly have mother tongue lessons after school, for one or two hours a week.

Classes are paid for privately; teachers must be approved by the department head.

All parents are given a booklet on the subject when they first bring their child to the VIS for assessment.

Mother Tongue in the IB Diploma

Every year some 30 to 35 students take IB exams in their mother tongue, mostly at Language A1 HL or SL; several in Language A2 or B.

There is much work involved in this area: finding teachers; initiating them into the IB programme; keeping them to deadlines.

There is no doubt that bilingualism leads to greater academic success, helps the students keep in touch with their home culture, and maintains diversity.

Advantages:

Instruction in a student's mother-tongue will help him or her become more proficient in English.

Many students who have been at VIS for some time can talk quite well in their mother tongue (if not English), but know nothing of their own culture, history, or literature, and have poor writing skills.

To begin mother-tongue classes just before the IB exam is often too late; it is continuity that counts - beginning in the Primary School. Students need to prepare in advance for offering the language as one of the subjects for the International Baccalaureate Diploma or Certificates at the end of the Grade 11 and 12 courses.

Many students who have just arrived at VIS think they do not need classes in their Mother Tongue as “they have only just left their country and are good at writing their own language”. This may be true, but they will quickly lose these skills if they do not practise them, and they should also keep in touch with their own culture, history, and literature.

They may need to meet entry requirements for universities in their home country.

Procedures

It is not possible to finance from the school budget all the many languages represented among VIS pupils. Where financial support is provided by parents or some other outside source, the school arranges private classes for students’ Mother Tongues.

Lessons arranged, according to need, have included:

Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Filipino, Finnish, French, Georgian, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Malayalam, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, etc.

The Head of the ESL and Mother-Tongue Department should be consulted before a private class is established if school credit is to be sought for the work done (room 153, telephone extension 277; email: mcarder@vis.ac.at). For this, the teacher and an outline syllabus must be approved, and an undertaking given by the teacher that school grades and reports will be provided at the usual times. A form containing details of responsibilities has to be signed by parents, teachers, and students. The form is available in Room 153, and in the Secondary Office.

Currently – 2006 – some forty teachers are teaching various Mother Tongues to about 180 students in the Secondary School.

Research validation for Mother Tongue instruction

Two researchers from George Mason University in the USA, Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, each of them a Professor Emeritus, undertook a huge research project on 700,000 students over twenty years. They stated that the greater amount of Mother Tongue instructional support for ESL students, combined with balanced ESL instruction, the higher students are able to achieve academically in English in each succeeding academic year, in comparison to matched groups being schooled only in English, with no Mother Tongue instruction. They concluded that of all the student background variables, the most powerful predictor of academic success in English is formal schooling in their Mother Tongue. This is true whether Mother Tongue schooling is received only in their home country or in both their home country and the USA.

Research validation and the VIS ESL and Mother Tongue programme.

Professor Collier has come as an adviser to the VIS on various occasions. Recently she wrote about the type of programme best suited to International Schools, with their many different languages among student populations. In the Foreword to The International Schools Journal Compendium: Volume 1, ESL (ed. Murphy, 2003:8) Professor Collier wrote: “When the demographics of a school population include a multilingual student group with small numbers of each language represented, then mother tongue literacy development for each language group, combined with ESL taught through academic content, may be the best choice for support of non-English-speakers’ needs.”

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