Goeie Dag
Good Day
Molweni

Thank you for inviting me to join your celebration today, and for asking me to say a few words.

This is a special moment in the history of the iiLwimi Sentrum, as you celebrate your 5th anniversary.

Anniversaries are important because they provide an opportunity to pause and reflect on what you have achieved to date and what you still have to do to achieve your objectives.

Anniversaries are milestones that mark the progress of your particular journey. They are happy events because they celebrate achievements to date and reflect confidence in the future. We only celebrate anniversaries if we are heading in the right direction.

I'm pleased to say that iiLwimi has already chalked up an impressive track record in the first five years of your existence. You are definitely traveling in the right direction.

Your mission, to improve the quality of life by empowering communities through language, is a mission that Government wholeheartedly support. And I think it is a mission that needs the support of everyone who wants to see our country succeed.

Knowledge of more than one language - and preferably three or more, especially our indigenous languages - is an extremely liberating experience.

There is no doubt than the ability to speak and understand different languages improves the quality of our lives, both as individuals and as members of our diverse communities.

Language provides us with insights and a much deeper understanding of how we view the world and each other.

Different languages enable us to look at familiar things differently. They enable us to discover new things about our sisters and brothers, about our various communities, and provide us with the means to build our nation together. In this respect, I want to acknowledge your contribution.

When this new provincial government was sworn in after the elections, we had to take an honest look at our province and recognise that we still have a long way to go in building this province as a Home for All.

As MEC for Education, I was given the political responsibility to ensure that my department contributes to building the Western Cape as a Learning Home for All our children.

To this end, I have committed the department to be the leading role player in providing the skills, knowledge and the values towards our development strategy of "Ikapa Elihlumayo" - meaning to "grow and share the Cape".

If indeed we are going to grow and share the Cape as a Home for All, then we must promote the objective of multi-lingualism. Therefor, the Western Cape Education Department fully supports everything you are doing to promote multi-lingualism in this country.

You are basically celebrating multi-lingualism tonight, and I am very pleased to join you in this celebration.

I would also like to take this opportunity of thanking you for everything you are doing for multi-lingualism in our schools.

I have noted that one of your biggest projects entails delivering language and curriculum support in multi-lingual classrooms in the Western Cape, particularly in areas such as Gugulethu, Blue Downs, the West Coast and the Helderberg Basin.

I agree with you that we should see our multi-lingual environment as a resource, rather than a problem.

Your point of departure is not to offer "solutions" to a problem, but rather to take teachers through a process of discovering the role of language in our society for themselves, and how they should respond to the issues involved.

Your approach has provided valuable insights into how we should approach language teaching and our schools and officials have certainly benefited from working with you.

We certainly face a major task in our efforts to meet the requirements of our Constitution to "create conditions for the development and for the promotion of the equal use of all official South African languages".

The WCED's approach is in line with the Language in Education Policy of the national Department of Education.

The policy recognises the critical importance of the mother-tongue as the language of the heart.

The policy also promotes additive multi-lingualism. This means that learners must learn additional languages at the same time as maintaining and developing their home languages.

Additive multi-lingualism makes it possible for learners to acquire complex skills such as reading and writing in their strongest language. They are then able to transfer these skills to their additional language.

The policy of the WCED is to provide mother-tongue instruction in the Foundation Phase, followed by additive multi-lingualism in subsequent phases, in line with national policy.

The Revised National Curriculum Statement also recognises the importance of mother-tongue instruction for learning to be effective.

For this reason, the General Education and Training requires a thorough knowledge of the learners' mother-tongue or home language, to provide a sound base for learning additional languages.

Other interventions include the WCED's 100-books project, which aims to build literacy in primary schools, by ensuring that learners read at least 100 books during the course of the year.

The project supports multi-lingualism by providing reading materials to all learners in all three languages.

Seventy of the books are in the home language of the class concerned, while the languages of the remaining 30 books are split evenly between the other two official languages.

We obviously have a long way to go before we have built a trilingual society in the Western Cape. While our resources are limited, our commitment is there. We are all in this together.

None of us can do this on our own. We have to rely on partnerships to take this project forward.

We have every reason to celebrate the partnership we have forged so far between the WCED and iiLwimi, and to join you in celebrating your 5th anniversary this evening.

We look forward to walking with you as we journey together on this special mission, and to joining you at an even bigger celebration in five years' time.