Although most Maldivians speak Dhivehi at home, English is virtually the only medium of instruction in primary schools. While English is deemed valuable for academic and economic success, national school statistics show poor academic achievement, and teachers have expressed their concerns about the use of English for educational quality.
In order to investigate whether the poor educational outcomes in the Maldives are indeed related to insufficient proficiency in the language of instruction, we conducted a case study in which we examined the level of English, as well as literacy and numeracy outcomes, in 25 children attending the 5th and 6th grade of a public school on a small island in the Maldives. We aimed (1) to establish the level of proficiency (vocabulary and morphosyntax) after five to six years of education in English, (2) to examine whether reading abilities are related to the different components of English proficiency, and (3) to examine whether performance on different types of mathematical problems are related to language and reading skills.
Our results show that while children performed normally on a nonverbal intelligence test, they underperformed on all language, reading and mathematics tasks, with reading comprehension and mathematical word problems being especially problematic. Furthermore, we found a significant correlation between English vocabulary and reading accuracy (r = .489, p = .024), and between mathematical word problems and vocabulary (r = .513 p = .009) as well as reading accuracy (r = .444, p = .044).
By showing a relation between language, literacy and mathematical abilities, these findings contribute to a growing body of research suggesting that using a second language as the only medium of instruction may be detrimental to learning outcomes. We argue in favor of a bilingual model of education, in which the importance of native language development is emphasized.