Judy Gill
The child’s name has been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
English is now an official language of New Zealand but the Ministry of Education’s language policies have not caught up. Across early childhood education, schools and official education communications, English is still routinely blended with isolated te reo Māori vocabulary and presented as though that mixture were either proper bilingualism or a requirement of bicultural education.
This article was inspired by a parent’s interaction with a Busy Bees early childhood education centre over his two-year-old daughter. The child’s father is New Zealand European, her mother is Filipina, and the family wants her grounded in correct international English while she develops spoken language. They asked Busy Bees for an English-language learning environment. Busy Bees refused.
The dispute provides a concrete example of a much wider problem with education policy. Busy Bees has confirmed in writing that te reo Māori will remain woven through the child’s everyday interactions, routines, songs, stories, learning experiences and relationships. For years, te reo Māori itself has been reduced in education to scattered nouns, greetings, slogans and commands inside otherwise English sentences. That does not teach te reo Māori properly and now that English has formal official-language status the same practice also bastardises English. If a family cannot decline that language programme, it is compulsion.
The recognition of English as an official language should have triggered an immediate review across every education sector: ECE, primary, secondary, teacher education, professional development, curriculum guidance and ministry communications. But the old policy settings continue as though nothing changed.
English is the language most New Zealanders use for ordinary communication and is the international language their children will rely on across higher education, employment, travel, science, commerce and professional life. Parents are entitled to want their children taught proper English that is recognisable internationally.
A child can learn te reo Māori as well. That is genuine multilingualism. But proper multilingualism does not require turning English into a grab-bag of Māori substitutions, nor reducing te reo Māori to a handful of words embedded in English. Both languages deserve better than that.
BUSY BEES says:
We are unable to provide an assurance that [Mia] will be exposed exclusively to English while at the centre.
This means that we cannot restrict the use of Te Reo Māori around [Mia] or within the wider learning environment.
Te Reo Māori is woven naturally through our everyday interactions, routines, songs, stories, learning experiences and relationships.
Mia has New Zealand European and Filipino heritage, she is two years old, still developing her spoken language and already growing up with English and Tagalog as her two family languages. Her parents want her grounded properly in English first.
Her parents have no strong objection to her learning Māori later by choice. What they do not want is a mixed language imposed throughout her ECE environment before she has a firm grounding in English.
The practice being challenged is not coherent teaching of te reo Māori as a second language. It is English sentences and English teaching material peppered with a smattering of Māori vocabulary.
Busy Bees’ approach is underpinned by the Te Ao Māori values of manaakitanga and whanaungatanga. But how exactly does replacing ordinary English words with isolated Māori words inside otherwise English sentences demonstrate this? There is no obvious linguistic connection between those values and a smattering of substituted vocabulary. Sprinkling Māori words through English does not, by itself, honour either language nor proves any of those values are being expressed.
If Busy Bees wants to claim that this mixed register embodies those concepts, it should explain precisely how. Otherwise the terminology functions as a cultural label attached to a language-mixing practice, not as an explanation of why that practice is educationally sound.
The word bastardisation is particularly apt after Green MP Tamatha Paul told Parliament during the English Language Bill debate: “English is a bastard language.” She went on to incorrectly call it “a bastardisation of Greek, Old Norse, Latin”. But if te reo Māori is an official language worth preserving, why reduce it to isolated words and splice those fragments into English? That practice bastardises both languages: te reo Māori is reduced to fragments while standard English is turned into a manufactured hybrid.
If children are to learn te reo Māori, teach te reo Māori properly. If parents want English, teach English properly. A scattering of vocabulary from one language tossed through another is not fluency in two languages.
Busy Bees says it operates more than 85 ECE centres right across New Zealand and provides education to more than 6,000 children. Those children come from homes where many different languages are spoken, including English, Samoan, Mandarin, Hindi, Tongan, Tagalog, Cantonese, Punjabi, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, German and te reo Māori, among others.
Yet Busy Bees says it is te reo Māori that must be woven through every child’s day. Why is this one additional language compulsory while the many other languages of Busy Bees families remain matters of family background and choice?
Experienced multilingual teachers have argued that languages should be learned properly rather than reduced to a handful of substituted words.
Sandy Pike: “Mixing maori words and English within a sentence creates a third language.”
Irene van Egten: “True bilingualism is structured and built on strong first-language mastery – not on casual mixing in early instruction.”
Irene van Egten has also described the current practice as “a complete mess where random te reo words are mixed into English spoken and written. And yet no one is learning the language effectively.” These are teachers who value language learning and their argument is that a child who knows a small set of Māori nouns, greetings and numbers inside English is not bilingual.
Nathan Wallis is one of New Zealand’s best-known neuroscience educators, his material focuses on brain development and the importance of the early years and he has specifically delivered professional development for early childhood teachers. But invoking Nathan Wallis – or simply invoking ‘neuroscience’ – does not answer this dispute. I have found no statement from Wallis saying that sprinkling isolated Māori vocabulary through otherwise English sentences is how a two-year-old becomes bilingual. Yes, learning more than one language can be valuable. But that does not answer this dispute. The children are not being taught two complete languages to fluency. They are being taught English with a scattering of Māori vocabulary inserted into it. Repeating the word neuroscience does not turn language mixing into coherent bilingual education.
Yes, te reo Māori is an official language. So is New Zealand Sign Language. Yet ECE centres do not make New Zealand Sign Language compulsory for every two-year-old, thread it through every newsletter and routine or insist that every family must absorb it throughout the ECE environment.
Official-language status does not make a language compulsory for every toddler. If parents want Māori-medium early childhood education, kōhanga reo exists. This family did not choose Māori-medium education: they chose an ordinary ECE service and asked for English. Choice has to work both ways.
Winston Peters recently caused controversy after telling Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country”. But variations of that phrase are routinely tossed at ordinary New Zealand citizens whenever they challenge te reo Māori content.
What these phrases really mean is your opinion does not belong in New Zealand. They attempt to delegitimise the speaker rather than answer the argument – and they are delivered in English, often by New Zealanders who are themselves of European heritage.
Citizenship and belonging do not depend on agreeing with a particular cultural or language policy. English is now an official language of New Zealand. Wanting a child to be taught correct English is not a foreign position and disagreement with compulsory cultural or language content does not make anyone less entitled to belong here.
