Rethinking, Resurrecting and Revitalizing Mother Tongue Instruction at ELT Classrooms in Basic Schools

Abstract

Through this hermeneutic phenomenological research, I tried to explore the perceptions of teacher/head teachers towards mother tongue instructions in community schools and the understanding of parents regarding the practice. For that, I employed in-depth interview and collected data from 18 participants: 1:2:3 head-teachers, English subject teachers and parents from three schools i.e. three head teachers, six teachers teaching basic level students and nine parents sending their children at community schools selected purposively. Based on the analysis and interpretation of the responses, I concluded that the head teachers and teachers were in favour of MTI as MoI for several reasons like comprehensible input, interactivities in the classroom, student friendly teaching and learning and natural delivery of the lessons. However, they were not in a condition to defend the school administration (School Management Committee) because of the pressure of parents and the threat of losing job (no students no job) even though they knew the advantages of MTI. On the other hand, parents were happy for few English words uttered by their children at home. Parents seemed unaware about the advantages of comprehensive input to bring desired outcome. It implies that the right of basic school students to get education in their mother tongue needs to be taken into consideration for cognitive as well as all round development of students. Rethinking about the practice, resurrecting the mother tongue and revitalizing it might be judicial decision at present.