Is this the reason our learners do so badly in International tests?

In his book “Outliers” Jamaican-Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell investigates a wide variety of areas of human endeavour, including education.

He records how the national airline of South Korea went from having the worst safety record of all national airlines to the best – simply by changing the language of all in-cockpit conversations from Korean to English. And he appropriates (without acknowledgement) and makes famous Erasmus’s theory of 10 000 hours of practice being required for anyone to gain mastery of a skill.

But he also looks at why students from Asia dominate the pure-science faculties of the top universities and suggests this is – in a way similar to the Korean Air project – simply because of language. The words for all numbers in most Eastern languages are monosyllabic which makes it easier to remember strings of them.

Many South Africans will remember former President Zuma’s famous difficulty with the pronunciation of “eleventy thousand”, but when South Africa continually occupies the bottom rung of the list of 61 nations whose children are tested in the TIMSS research into maths and science proficiency, this is no laughing matter.

It is to my eternal shame that despite living the majority of my life in KwaZulu Natal, I am far from fluent in its most-spoken language. Nevertheless, living as I do in a rural area, I am surrounded by White farmers who speak Zulu as well as, and in the odd case better than, the Zulu workers they employ.

Zulu existed for centuries as a spoken language, with no attempt by its speakers to record their thoughts in written form. And the European missionaries who first attempted to record the language used an alphabet ill-suited to it. Quite apart from the arbitrary decision to use the letters C, Q and X for the three clicks, they failed to find a way of recording, for example, an accurate representation of more mundane sounds.

To return to ex-President Zuma: I remember him being critical of the way White people pronounce his home district. “Nkaaandla,” he mocked us, and quite reasonably, for the correct pronunciation is closer to “Ngandla”. The consonant sound represented by the “k” is hallway between an English hard “k” and a “g” and if you want to harden the “k” you need to follow it with an “h” (as in “Mkhonto”).

The point I am trying to make is that although Zulu may be a hard language to speak, it is a much harder one to read. Does this have any bearing on our Grade 5 cohorts doing so badly compared to all the others’ Grade 4s? I think it does.

And if life is difficult for the Zulu learner when it comes to words, it is another level of impossible when it comes to numbers.

Try this: write out this phone number – 728-9639 – in words and count the number of syllables. Seven-two-eight – nine-six-three-nine: eight syllables. In Zulu, the same number is – isikhombisa-kubili-isishiyagalombili – isishiyagalolunye-isithupa-khuthathu-isishiyagalombili: 34 syllables.

You don’t need a degree in Higher Pedagogics to see there’s a problem here.  The bigger problem is that so far nobody has come up with a solution.

If you have a suggestion, please let me know.