Teachers’ language ideologies, conflicting language policy and practices in Zimbabwean education system

Abstract

To date, Zimbabwe does not have an overt and comprehensive language policy. Policy is inferred from language practices in various spaces and from pieces of legislation in education, the media and legal domains. In multilingual schools, teachers make and renegotiate language policy through practices and choices that they make to manage classroom multilingualism. This article examines teachers’ self-reported language ideologies and how they occasioned conflicting language practices with the top-down language-in-education policy in Zimbabwe. Drawing on Spolsky’s innovation in the theory of language policy, the article specifically discusses how teachers’ ideologies about African languages and colonially inherited English predispose them to naturalise and normalise English as the default language of instruction, contrary to the provision for the use of African languages in the Education Act. I argue that the mismatch between the top-down policy and bottom-up practices is mediated in part by a lack of broad-based considerations of the sociolinguistic, economic and political factors. Together, these engender language ideologies that inform the practice of foisting English on students in the classroom, thereby diminishing transformative educational outcomes for African language-speaking learners. Teachers’ views showed that translanguaging could be a welcome language management alternative to the ‘difficult to implement’ mother tongue instruction.