Eighty percent of South Africa’s 12.7-million school children aren’t educated in their home language. Since 2025, the Department of Basic Education has been rolling out mother-tongue bilingual education from Grade 4.
In a case study at a Khayelitsha primary school in Cape Town, Dr Robyn Tyler and her colleagues from the Bilingual Learning Materials Project taught 168 Grade 4 learners using a bilingual isiXhosa-English science textbook.
The one class assessed bilingually scored an 86% pass rate, compared with 51% for classes that wrote the English-only test.
The study found that learners across the bilingual classes were more engaged, contributing more to discussion and writing more in their exercise books.
Image: Wikipedia.
