Findings from psychological research show that learning through the medium of a foreign (weaker) language may be mediated by the stronger mother tongue; yet in many developing countries, a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction in the early school years when children are inept in the foreign language. A psychological implication of this educational practice is that such children come to possess a common representational (conceptual) system for the two languages instead of possessing separated representational systems; they also come to possess dependent instead of independent linguistic systems. An educational implication of this is that school children may find it difficult to acquire basic concepts through the medium of the foreign language because of the inefficient learning strategy of referring all foreign language concepts to the mother tongue. It is suggested that school children receive instruction through the mother tongue for the first six years at school.
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