Students as language experts: collaboration and correction in a bilingual Cameroonian classroom

ABSTRACT

This study examines the negotiation of language-related problems in a bilingual environmental education workshop in Cameroon. In contrast to the traditional Cameroonian classroom, where only one language is used and teachers are viewed as the exclusive source of knowledge, during the workshop, teachers’ errors in French create an opportunity for both teachers and students to collaboratively restructure participant roles. This correction leads to an atmosphere where students are active and engaged co-producers of knowledge, instead of passive recipients. While much has been written about how teachers correct students, this study looks instead at teachers’ linguistic errors, and how the treatment of these errors can create a more equitable classroom dynamic. It therefore uses a conversation analytic framework to analyze recordings of classroom conversation, combined with interviews with teachers surrounding their linguistic backgrounds and teaching philosophies. The results of this study contribute to discussions regarding the negotiation of multilingualism in the classroom, which is of particular significance as it becomes more common worldwide for educators to teach in languages in which they are not fluent.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• classroom discourse
• identity construction
• language competence
• language ideologies

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the staff at Mvog-Betsi Zoo-Botanical Gardens for their participation and assistance with this study, in particular the education staff of Ape Action Africa. She would also like to thank Dr. Marjorie Harness Goodwin for her insights and feedback throughout this project. This work was made possible by generous support from the UCLA Division of Graduate Studies through the Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program, and by the UCLA Department of Anthropology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosalie Edmonds is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores the politics of multilingualism in environmental conservation work in Cameroon.

Notes

1 In a 1996 amendment to the constitution, however, Cameroon’s indigenous languages were promoted to the status of ‘national languages’ although this promotion did not come with increased institutional support (Nforgwei 2009, 98).

2 Kuchah (2013) however does report that English-language schooling is becoming more popular with Francophone families.

3 The imbalance between Francophone and Anglophone Cameroon both in terms of size and representation in government has led to numerous conflicts since independence, escalating into ongoing protests, strikes, and violence beginning in November 2016 (BBC 2017a, 2017b).

4 While most children outside of urban areas enter school with little knowledge of either official language, mother tongue education has not been implemented in the country due to fears that elevating certain languages over others could lead to tribalism and a disintegration of national unity, as well as the difficulty of developing didactic materials in many different languages (Nyamnjoh 1999; Kouega 2003).

5 Both ‘bon’ and ‘bien’ can be translated as ‘good’. However, ‘bon’ is more commonly used as an adjective, as the teacher is using it here, while ‘bien’ is more commonly an adverb (i.e. ‘well’). However, ‘bien’ can be used as an adjective with the verb ‘être’ (‘to be’), and in that case has a moral connotation. This is likely why the students chose it, and why I have translated it as ‘right’ above.

6 I have translated ‘on ne dit pas’ as ‘it’s not’ rather than ‘one does not’ in an attempt to capture the subject-less quality of the construction in French. In this example, the student is effectively telling the teacher ‘you have written this incorrectly’, but the use of on instead mitigates the directness of the statement, allowing him to give an overt correction without being as face-threatening toward his teacher.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles and by the UCLA graduate summer research mentorship program.