IMPORTANCE OF REGIONAL LANGUAGE- CHILD’S CREATIVE THINKING

• Recently, the Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) emphasised that early initiation of learning a mother tongue is important for a child’s creative thinking.
• Regional language is a term used to refer to a language that is spoken by a sizeable number of people but is not the de facto language of communication in the rest of the country.
• A language is considered regional when it is mostly spoken by people who reside largely in one particular area of a state or country.
• Even though Article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution states that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagiri Script. 

Need for Regional Language

• To remove the dilemma regarding giving preference to English language rather than any vernacular language and let the child think naturally in their own mother tongue.
• There was a need to change our attitudes, so that when someone asked a question in a class in a regional language, they should not feel inferior.
• Subject-Specific Improvement: Several studies in India and other Asian countries suggest a positive impact on learning outcomes for students using a regional medium rather than the English medium.
• Performance in science and math, in particular, has been found to be better among students studying in their native language compared to English.
• Higher Rates of Participation: Studying in the native language results in higher attendance, motivation and increased confidence for speaking up among students and improved parental involvement and support in studies due to familiarity with the mother tongue.
• Poor grasp of English has been tied by many educationists to dropout rates at the premier engineering education institutions as well as poor performance of some students.
• Additional Benefits for the Less-Advantaged: This is especially relevant for students who are first-generation learners (the first one in their entire generation to go to school and receive an education) or the ones coming from rural areas, who may feel intimidated by unfamiliar concepts in an alien language. 

Regional Language be Promoted in Education

• Either institutes would adopt a regional language as a medium of instruction or it would serve as a learning aid for students in English medium who may not be proficient in the language.
• There was artificial intelligence-based technology available to enable real-time translations that would be seen in classrooms in the future.
• The National Education Policy 2022 lays emphasis on promoting mother tongue which should be a medium of instruction at least till class fifth or class eighth and after which it should be offered as a language.
• It also urges universities to develop study material in regional languages.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT