Western Cape education officials are considering making Xhosa teachers available across the province to help schools achieve a multi-lingual education system.
Education MEC Cameron Dugmore said a task team was being formed to work out the practicalities of the language policy, which should be gazetted by the end of the year.
"This is a firm commitment we are making in response to the minister of education's call," Dugmore said.
One plan is to form a pool of itinerant Xhosa teachers in each magisterial district to help schools that don't offer the language.
Western Cape education department senior curriculum planner Anne Schlebusch said while it was the school governing body's duty to declare the language medium of instruction at a school, the policy was meant to equalise the status of the province's three official languages at schools.
"We have a legacy of having given status only to English and Afrikaans and if something like this step actually upgrades the status of Xhosa in schools, it has an automatic boost for Xhosa children and their parents," said Schlebusch.
Aside from practicalities such as finding appropriate textbooks and suitable teachers, Schlebusch said two important issues had to be thrashed out.
These were supporting teachers to eventually extend mother tongue education to Grade 6, and making a third language compulsory for three years.
Schlebusch said the importance of receiving mother tongue instruction had been proven empirically. Children struggled initially to learn abstract concepts and they were at a double disadvantage if it was in another language.
"Research says a child needs five to seven years before developing academic proficiency in a second language," she said.
She added that several township primary school teachers used Xhosa to explain concepts to children, then switched over to English, the school's medium of instruction.
The best way to support these teachers was to provide textbooks and support material in Xhosa and alert them to new teaching methodologies where necessary.
She said the issue of introducing Xhosa as a compulsory language stemmed from a provision in the Revised National Curriculum Statement which said all pupils had to learn an African language for at least three years by the end of Grade 9.
The Western Cape education language policy should stipulate in which grades this would happen.
Schlebusch said the curriculum for learning a third language was already in place, but a system would have to be worked out for children who had never been exposed to the language to catch up to those who had.
While the move to give Xhosa equal status to English and Afrikaans in education has been widely welcomed, the big question is whether the Western Cape has enough teachers who can handle Xhosa as a medium of instruction.
In the past two years, not a single teacher graduating from the University of Cape Town qualified as a Xhosa teacher. None of the teachers who graduated from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology specialised in teaching languages and their medium of instruction is English.
Schlebusch, however, thinks the situation is not all that dire since many teachers have a working knowledge of Xhosa which, with sufficient retraining, they could put to good use.
Dugmore added that one way to encourage matriculants to become Xhosa teachers was to provide pay-back bursaries through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, thus guaranteeing and creating jobs.
He said the department would also, for the first time, honour the best multilingual matriculant at the end of this year to demonstrate the importance attached to the concept.
