During the Committee discussion on languages, the point that was emphasised in the presentation is that English and Afrikaans are not the home language of the large majority of African learners who reside in deep rural areas. However, in the schooling system assessments, examinations and teaching and learning are conducted via English or Afrikaans, which are “foreign” to such learners as it is not their “mother-tongue” language. Hence, African children from deep rural areas are further disdavantaged because of the Language of Learning and Teaching (LoLT) used in the majority of the classrooms, which is not an indigenous African Language and may therefore be considered “foreign” to such learners.
The South African Oxford Secondary School Dictionary (page: 238) offers four definitions of the word “foreign”. For example “not belonging naturally to a place or to someone’s character”, “coming from outside”. The illustrated Oxford Dictionary (1998:316) further defines the word foreign as “of, from, in, or characteristic of a country or a language other than one’s own”. Hence, the position of the Department of Basic Education is that learners in deep rural areas that have an indigenous african language may justifiably regard other languages such as English and Afrikaans as foreign to them even though both English and Afrikaans are official languages.