this has been attributed to a number of interconnected factors including the lack of mothertongue education for most san communities cultural differences between home and school cultural practices such as hunting trips and initiation ceremonies that keep students from attending school frequent abuse at the hands of school authorities and other students and the experience of alienation in boarding schools the aim of this initiative is to support teachers in applying mother tonguebased bilingual approaches to literacy and numeracy development and to provide tested tools for strengthening the childs learning of the home language and acquisition of english available at unicef languageandlearningsouthafricapdf