Prospects of Mother Tongue as a Medium of Instruction in Nigerian Primary Level Education

Abstract

This paper investigates the prospects in the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in Nigeria’s primary level of education. With the multilingual nature of Nigeria, many scholars have continued to clamour for the use of indigenous languages as a medium of instruction in Nigeria’s primary schools. This paper also seeks to justify the reasons why mother tongue education may not be feasible in the nearest future especially with the numerous roles that the English language plays in Nigeria, and the myriads of difficulties which constitute stumbling blocks to its realization. In doing this, two research questions were generated, and data collected from 150 primary school teachers, from both private and public primary schools in Gwagwalada Area Council of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) through purposive sampling technique. The instrument for data collection is a well-structured questionnaire. The questionnaire is made up of two sections, sections A and B. Section A sought for demographic data of respondents, while section B sought for information on the factors militating against mother tongue as a medium of instruction in primary schools in Nigeria. The data collected were analyzed using Crombatch Alpha, mean and standard deviation. The result of the analysis revealed that the multilingual nature of Nigeria, and lack of names of instructional materials and science equipment in the indigenous languages are impediments to the use of mother tongue as a medium of instruction in Nigerian primary level of education.