Research findings on languages of instruction and their policy implications for education in Africa

In 1953 Unesco published a monograph on The Use of Vernacular in Education, whose key message was that the best language of instruction (LoI) is the mother tongue of the learner. This piece of educational wisdom was soon to have a special appeal to the governments of independent African nations, most of which had placed education at the top of their development agenda. Against that appeal was the overwhelming ethnolinguistic complexity of the majority of the African nation-states and the socio-economic benefits of being educated in a western language that was equipped for communicating modern ideas in the arts, sciences, and technology, besides being a prestigious international language. What was the best course of action and what do we learn from the attempts that have been made? The present report is an overview of research findings on a wide range of African experiences (and an analogous Peruvian experience) in trying to find a viable solution to this question. The survey was commissioned by the International · Development Research Centre's Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa. The survey was to focus on researches concerning the relationship between LoI and factors such as cognitive achievements and attitudinal dispositons; the linguistic considerations in using a language for mass instruction (schooling); and the experiences in the 'implementation of ~oI policies in Africa. The survey started from Kenyan experiences and broadened out to other experiences. The reviewed research strongly suggests that there are cognitive and cultural benefits in having .one's education in the mother tongue (home language) at least in the early years of school education. But the survey shows even more clearly that there are strong attitudinal barriers against the use of indigenous African languages as Lo I, especially if that denies the learners a chance to acquire a good command of an international language such as English or French.Such attitudes are based on pragmatic considerations of the marketability of language ·skills in the world outside the classroom. The real challenge for policy-makers in Africa, therefore, is to design policies that will give their citizens the best of both worlds. As I suggest in section 5 of the report, the solution lies in designing a bilingual (or, where neccessary, multilingual) education programme that caters for all the langauge needs of the learner without the problems of medium-shift reported in a number of the reviewed researches. The specific details of such a programme must be worked out by the language and education experts of each country, backed by the neccessary amount of political will

Language policy for basic education for all in Kenya

Meeting: National Conference on Education for All, Kisumu, KE, 26-30 July, 199