Transitional multilingual education policies in Africa: necessary compromise or strategic impediment?

Abstract

Despite advances in multilingual education (MLE) scholarship, education in most African societies remain characteristically congruent with colonial normative monolingual and transitional multilingual policies, which limit the use of native language(s) as media of instruction to early primary schooling. This contributes to poor educational and social outcomes far below the projected benefits of MLE. Convinced that the complex relationships between language and education have been discerned, MLE scholarship has become increasingly advocacy oriented to corresponding policies and practices, with purportedly widespread resistance from parents, policymakers, and educators. This focused ethnographic inquiry into the perspectives of parents, educators, researchers, and policymakers on MLE finds mixed messages in MLE advocacy that foment localized resistance to and disincentivize full native language-based MLE (NLB-MLE) policy changes. Specifically, transitional multilingualism, a compromise with NLB-MLE opposition, entails inherent instrumentality and linguistic hierarchy, which undermines the fundamental principles of linguistic and cultural diversity that is the hallmark of NLB-MLE. Considering the colonial, political, and scientific sources of transitional multilingualism, the findings support a reconfiguration of the intellectual anchorage, social agenda, and discursive scope of MLE scholarship to address the strategic challenge, which transitional multilingualism poses to NLB-MLE policy shift and its pedagogical and cultural promises.

KEYWORDS:

• ethnographic inquiry
• education in Africa
• language policy
• multilingual education
• plurilingual
• transitional multilingualism

Notes

1. Using ‘native language’ in NLB-MLE acknowledges the conceptual inadequacies of popular terms like ‘mother tongue’ and ‘first language/L₁’ for delineating a person’s foundational linguistic repertoire (see Benson and Kosonen 2013), which may not be the mother’s language, the first language, or a single language, even if geographically and culturally native to the person/people.

2. Albaugh (2014) finds significant increases (40–80%) in the use of African languages in education since independence, but this conflates transitional policies with NLB-MLE practices, thus illustrating the issue of this study.

3. For details on UN/UNESCO conventions and declarations, see UNESCO (2003).

4. Albaugh (2014) argues that Francophone linguistic research community is united in support of MLE, and that scholarly fragmentation is more characteristic of Anglophone academics. The fact that Francophone scholars support MLE only as a means to expand French language dominance in Africa (Albaugh 2014) vitiates the import of this distinction.

5. Rwanda’s shift to English-only LoI in 2008 is complicated by post-genocide anti-French social reconstructionism (Samuelson and Freedman 2010). Indeed, all language policy changes are bound to their society’s unique histories, steeped in complex non-linguistic social and political transactions.

6. Other historical revisionists challenge critiques of European imperialism (see e.g., Lefkowitz 2008 and D’Souza 2002). For contemporary African perspectives on European colonialism, see Boahen (2011) and Táíwò (2010).

7. Colonial support for native languages was widespread but never uniform or consistent across the odd half-century of colonialism. In Ghana, the 1882 Ordinance for the Promotion and Assistance of Education in the Gold Coast Colony required instruction of, and in, English. In 1925, the Guggisberg Ordinance reversed this decree, mandating native LoI during the first three years of schooling and transition to English LoI subsequently (Andoh-Kumi 2002; see also Clermont 1985). Similar policy applied to Nigeria (Fafunwa, Macauley and Sokoya 1989). In Kenya, few students were exposed to English (Gorman 1974). In nearby Uganda, successive colonial governors unsuccessfully advocated for Kiswahili LoI. Because missionaries were already using several native languages and associated Kiswahili with Islam, they resisted and ultimately defeated administrative support for Kiswahili (Kasozi 2000).

8. See Lugongo (2015) and Roy-Campbell (2001a, 2001b) on Tanzania, and McGregor (2000) and Mazrui & Mazrui (1995) on Uganda. For more on comparative colonial, independence and contemporary language policies in Africa, see Albaugh (2012).

9. The idea of ‘dual medium’, an extrapolation from U.S. bilingualism, permits a distinction between mainstream and minority languages. However, multilingualism in African contexts represents rich textures of overlapping sociolinguistic phenomena that are hardly reducible to simplistic binaries. Consequently, Heugh (2011) erroneously equates ESL students in two-way bilingual programs with African students from ‘2 language backgrounds’, and ESL/English-medium instruction excluding L₁ instruction with English-only instruction (Thomas and Collier 2012).

10. INARELS facilitates research collaboration among African researchers and their counterparts in the diaspora who are mutually interested in action research on language, education, and society (www.inarels.com).

11. Distinguishing dominant European languages from ‘dominant non-dominant’ languages/language varieties (e.g. Arabic in North Africa; KiSwahili in East Africa; Akan, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba in West Africa) underscores the additional threat to less-dominant local languages/varieties when more dominant regional varieties are privileged for educational and political purposes (see Benson and Kosonen 2013).

12. For more details in the various ways scholars distinguish between multilingualism and plurilingualism, see Martin-Jones, Blackledge, and Creese (2012) and Council of Europe (2011).