Language-in-education policy in low-income, postcolonial contexts: towards a social justice approach

ABSTRACT

The article considers how language-in-education policy in low-income, postcolonial countries may be better understood from a social justice perspective and some of the implications for policy, practice and research that arise from this. The article starts with a critical overview of the two dominant approaches towards conceptualising language-in-education policy, namely the instrumental and rights-based approaches. The article then sets out a social justice approach that builds critically on a rights-based perspective. Key features of the approach include considering language-in-education as a capability that has the potential to contribute to human well-being and to social justice and understanding the pedagogical, institutional and wider social barriers to achieving linguistic social justice in education and means for overcoming these barriers. Based on this understanding the article then sets out a research agenda that can assist in realising linguistic social justice in education across the three inter-related domains of the school, the home/community and the education system.

KEYWORDS:

• Language-in-education policy
• low-income countries
• social justice
• capability approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Leon Tikly is Professor in Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol. He is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformations at the University of Johannesburg and at the Centre for International Teacher Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Leon started his career as a science teacher in London schools and at a school for South African refugees in Tanzania. He worked as a policy researcher in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy before moving first to the University of Birmingham and then to the University of Bristol. Leon's main research interests include the development of global education policy, the quality of education in Africa and the achievement of disadvantaged groups in the UK.

Notes

1 See YouTube video with Sen entitled ‘Language as Capability’, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3MZvPnZW8g (accessed 5 January 2016).

2 The term ‘mother tongue’ is used in this article to refer to a local/familiar language, the language of the immediate community which is best known to the child.

3 Conversational fluency is often acquired to a functional level within about two years of initial exposure to the second language whereas at least five years is usually required to catch up to native speakers in academic aspects of the second language (Cummins 1981; Klesmer 1994). Failure to take account of the BICS/CALP (conversational/academic) distinction has resulted in discriminatory psychological assessment of bilingual students and premature exit from language support programs (e.g. bilingual education in the United States) into mainstream classes (Cummins 1984).