Mother Tongue
2 articles filed under this keyword.
Loss of the Native Language Role of the Mother Tongue
Salam Raheem Rashid
Loss of the Native Language Role of the Mother Tongue: The Threat of the Second Language (English) to Overtake the First Language (Kurdish) is the title of my thesis. The rationale behind this title is to account for the influence English has on Kurdish in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Today in most of the private schools of KRI, the language of instruction is English. Including nursery, kindergarten, primary and secondary stages, this has not only made English the formal instruction language, but also the main language of communication among the students studying at these schools. The explanation the school administrators provide to justify this shift is not convincing. The resent work consists of two chapters. The first chapter, titled Failure of Learning English Effectively in the public Schools, is dedicated to the methods of Second Language learning through school curriculums. We argue that these methods of have not been given the required importance in the public schools. The second chapter, Loss of the Native Language Role of the Mother Tongue, is a theoretical account of the threats English is losing on Kurdish in KRI through the curricula the private and exemplary schools are using.
Volume 12 · Issue 4 · August 2025Educational Bilingualism and Language attrition
Hazha Chicho Mohammed Amin, Sherzad Saheed Sedeeq
In recent years, a large number of English-language schools have been allowed to be established by the Ministry of Education, and the number is increasing year by year. Though the establishment of such schools was originally meant to be for bilingual education, but teaching of Kurdish in these schools has faced big problems, because Kurdish lessons are not given enough attention and least weekly lessons have been allocated for Kurdish. The researcher aims to show that the language of instruction in schools can have a significant impact on the mother tongue. This shows the role of schools in preserving and reviving Kurdish language. Moreover, the researcher aims to show the differences of Kurdish language attrition between students who study in English and those who study in Kurdish, which is shown by comparing them. The data and the tools used in the study are a questionnaire, which consists of four headings and 25 subheadings. Quantitative method was used to collect the data. After distributing the questionnaire form to the research community and answering the questions of the questionnaire by the participants and receiving the answers, the obtained data were analyzed using each of the statistical rules of Regression and One Way ANOVA. The researcher concluded that schools as non-linguistic basis accounted for 44.6% of mother tongue attrition among the students in the study sample. This is a very high and effective rate. This proves that such schools have not created a balanced language environment for students. This is why there is a big difference in mother tongue attrition between students attending English-medium schools and those attending Kurdish-medium schools.