Introduction
A sample study was undertaken to find out the effect on school achievement when the mother tongue of the students was different form the medium of instruction in school. For this sample study, the Central Schools in and around Delhi were taken up and the marks obtained by the students form Class-IV to X were analysed. The analysis was restricted to the marks in Hindi, a language subject and Social Studies, a content subject both of which were taught through the medium of Hindi. The sample did not include students whose mothertongue was Hindi. The students were divided into groups on the basis of their mothertongue's genetic affinity to Hindi and a comparative study of the achievement of these two groups were made. The findings of this study are reported below in two sections, the first on the achievement in Hindi and the second on the achievement in Social Studies.Before the findings are given, it is necessary to point out certain limitations of this study. The sample is very limited and is from a metropolitan city. The parents of the students under study are officers of the Government and other public institutions and as such belong to a single category. They are educated, mobile and their socio-economic status is of urban middle class.
(a) Achievement in Hindi
In this section the achievement in Hindi is reported for two groups A and B. Group A consists of students having Punjabi,Marathi, Urdu and Sindhi (Indo-Aryan languages) as their mother tongues. Group b consists of students having Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam (Dravidian languages) as their mothertongues. This grouping is based on a priori consideration of distance between mothertongue and Hindi, the medium of instruction. The hypothesis is that there is no difference in achievement in Hindi between the children whose mothertongue is nearer to Hindi and those whose mothertongue is not nearer to Hindi. To test this hypothesis the following method was followed.The marks in the annual examination in each class were converted to percentages to make them comparable. The percentages were classified into ten groups of equal intervals for which the frequencies were computed. They were computed for each group separately. The Kolmogrov-Smirnov two-sample test was applied to the data thus obtained. The result is given in Table 1. It shows the differences between the two groups with regard to their performance in Hindi in each class from Class IV to X.
TABLE 1
X = No Y = Yes
Class
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chi-square (observed)
1.85
14.01
7.51
15.62
3.46
4.57
5.08
Significance of difference
X
Y
Y
Y
X
X
X
It will be seen from Table 1 that there is no significant difference between the students of Group-A (whose mothertongue are Punjabi, Marathi, Sindhi and Urdu) and of Group-B (whose mother tongues are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) as far as their achievement in Hindi is concerned, except in Classes V, VI and VII. Since in the first year there is no significant difference in achievement in Hindi it may be concluded that there is no initial advantage for the child whose mothertongue nearer to Hindi, over the child whose mothertongue is not. The former seems to have a little better achievement during the next three years, but it is not uniform. There is a dip in the second of these three years. Since in the last three years there is no significant difference between the two groups, it may be concluded that the medial better achievement by Group-A is leveled off finally.
(b) Achievement in Social Studies
In this section the analysis of the achievement in Social Studies (learnt through Hindi medium) is reported for Groups-A and B. The hypothesis is that there is no difference in achievement in Social Studies (learnt through Hindi medium) among the students of Groups-A and B. The same method of analysis was followed as in the previous one. The results are given in Table 2 which shows the difference between the two groups with regard to their performance in Social Studies (through Hindi medium).TABLE 2
X = No Y = Yes
Class
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Chi-square (observed)
5.70
1.20
0.01
4.62
1.27
Significance of difference
X
X
X
X
X
It will be seen from this Table 2 that there is no difference between the students of Group-A (whose mother tongues are: Punjabi, Marathi, Sindhi and Urdu) and of Group-B (Whose mother tongues are: Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam) as far as their achievement in Social Studies (through Hindi medium) is concerned. This result confirms the result described in the first section.
