A Neurocognitive Approach to Mother Tongue Education

Education is not merely acquisition of new information. More importantly, the school must have a place for development of cognitive skills in the children and the best feeding ground for this is education through his/her home language and culture. With this principle, the National Policy on Education (NPE’86) of India made special mention that children’s education must begin with their home language and culture, especially when they are at the formative stage.

As human society and culture advanced, our needs and requirements also changed. The law of nature is such that the old elements of culture retrograde and the new ones seize this opportunity to replace them. Similarly, theories of learning also keep on modifying for improvement. Language education is not exceptional; it needs to keep pace with the changing culture and society that fits contemporary generation.

Dr. Kapfo has been devoting his researches in the area of mother tongue education in neurological perspectives for the last many years. He has been advocating that, the nation cannot progress unless we build up brain- power in the children and the best tool to do this is through their own mother, particular when their brain is still tender. Socially, mother tongue is not simply a language for communication, but is dolled up with native ethos and cultural values of that community. Native concepts are deeply buried down in the mother tongue and are already adapted into the system of brain mechanism of children. When a child is abruptly introduced to a foreign language environment he by-passed these social importance, which may ultimately disrupt adaptation system already founded in the mother tongue situation and thereby affect his mindset in the long-run. The school must therefore make children to begin to think rationally effectively in their own mother tongue so that the base of his mental processing units is firmly established. Thereafter, it can be abridged with second language situation.

I sincerely hope that readers will be benefited from the author’s views discussed in this book.

My main intention in writing this book has been to highlight neurocognitive relevance in the field of teaching languages. Though the present focus is at mother tongue education, it is also equally relevant with second language teaching.

For so long I have been in contention that there is ample scope to update pedagogical principles in the area of language teaching from neurocognitive perspective. Human physiology, however, is so complex a subject that the risk is so great for person like me, who is unequipped, to venture into such a complex issue. I felt myself quite incompetent to deal with it. Due to this reason I dare not to venture into it for a long time. There may, nevertheless, some readers argue that my implied extract is nothing more than a flaw. Whatever views one may have, my main purpose is to leave vital cues as to which direction the aim of language education must lead to so that the younger scholars may endeavor for further in-depth study.

The main concern is that, the present ways of teaching language, whether as mother tongue or as second language, does not contribute much justice to the cognitive generation of children. If we truly believe that thought and language are interactive and unitary in nature, the language teaching programmes have lot ‘to do with the augmentation of children’s computational mind through language teaching-learning _ process. Physiological principles of human nervous system can play as rich attributes to effective education whereby students, not only attain language competency, but also make use of it effectively in the learning the subjects as well as enhancing their general intellectual abilities.

Despite my best effort to present my point of views in plain and lucid manner I have been handicapped in many ways. This is so for the fact that a person who does not possess cannot also make use of it effectively. Whatever shortcomings, I trust, reader will bear with me.