colonies in Africa. He calls this linguistic imperialism, a cultural correlate of political imperialism. In this case the dominating language is imposed on a people and on the indigenous languages and consequently the dominated language begins to experience functional loss and eventually shrink structurally. Phillipson’s main argument here is that the monolingual language policies favoring European languages are not accidental; they are part of the grand scheme by the former colonial powers to keep control of the territories in collusion with the local westernized elite, what he characterizes as the center (mainly France and Britain) controlling the periphery (the former colonies). In addition, Phillipson is seeing neo-colonialism as an ideology…show more content… It is also often difficult to unite groups without a common cultural heritage or language, but a flexible language-in-education policy and pedagogical approaches that support the linguistic repertoire are best. They could empower people, and enable their participation. Mother tongue education can be used for knowledge construction that values the culturally-specific knowledge rather than the standardized often English curriculums. See Teachers as Policy Makers for how teachers can validate a mother tongue. See the example of Papua New…show more content… As Jelian (2013) described, educational experts believed that mother-tongue policy was inadequate unless the implementation of mother-tongue education matched with practical work on the ground. They added that opportunities and challenges should be considered carefully during its implementation. As indicated in literature, "Teachers lack the opportunity to gain the necessary competence and specific training in mother tongue was identified as a challenge. One of the issues that predominates discussion on the challenges of mother tongue implementation is shortage of qualified teachers who trained in mother tongue instruction. Hence, policies that encourage learning through a child’s home language suffer from an acute shortage of teachers who speak or have access to these home languages, yet one of the criteria for effective usage of local languages for instruction is that there must be enough teachers to teach in it (Fasold 1984, p. 292; Thomas 2009, p. 90). When teachers are not native speakers of the child’s Mother tongue or lack sufficient training on how to carry out mother tongue based teaching, they avoid the unknown good’ and regress to the ‘known bad’ (Ndung,