'If I don't learn English, I'm going to suffer': Gambian lower basic school children's voice in the medium of instruction debate

This article presents the results of an English Writing Contest that was organized in a public lower basic school in rural Gambia, West Africa, as part of a larger ethnographic research on English and literacy practices in The Gambia. The Gambia is a small ‘Anglophone’ country in West Africa with a straight-for-English English-only educational policy. In the writing contest, pupils from grade 4 to 6 (199 in sum) were asked to comment on one of the proposed topics: (1) Why it is important for me to learn English, and (2) Why I don’t like English. The attitudes toward English in the pupil’s compositions were considerably positive. At the same timehowever, they showed substantial problems writing English words and sentences, typical of “grassroots literacy”. The data are used as a from below perspective in the debate on the medium of instruction for African schools. Based on the children’s voice, i.e. what they write (contents), and their technical performance, i.e. how they write (form), I will argue against the use of English as a medium of instruction throughout, but also against the argument of linguistic imperialism. Instead, I suggest that the only way forward in this matter is to expand and officialise the as yet unofficial practice of multilingual classroom communication and to introduce local language teaching in the curriculum, both as subject and as language of instruction

How to write if you cannot write: collaborative literacy in a Gambian village

"According to the Department of State for Education of Africa’s smallest mainland country, ‘The Gambia has a low literacy rate, estimated at 46% overall and only 28% for women’ (DoSE 2006: 44). In this paper, I attempt to reveal certain aspects of the social, cultural and economic complexity behind these numbers by presenting an ethnographic analysis of a small telephone booklet in use by a low-literate rural young man, named L. I want to problematise the binary distinction between literates and illiterates, and argue that ‘illiterates’ like L often meaningfully engage in literacy practices in their daily lives

South-North trajectories and language repertoires

This chapter explores language in global South-North migration from the perspective of aspiring migrants in Lusophone West Africa within the context of increasingly restrictive European immigration regimes and their consequence of involuntary immobility in the South. While sociolinguistic scholarship has successfully engaged with globalization, mobility, and movement of people, it has insufficiently engaged with that which and those who don’t travel well. We argue that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to develop multi-sited methods and tools for investigating and understanding these absent presences – the invisibly excluded – and propose that repertoires and trajectories are useful tools in such undertaking. The paper attempts a theoretical review of these concepts and illustrates their analytical potential with three cases from ongoing fieldwork in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau as part of a larger ethnographic project at the University of Luxembourg that explores the language lives, learning histories, (unfinished) travels, further mobile aspirations and changing social status of young West Africans on the move. The paper concludes by arguing that South-North mobilities are shaped by as well as shaping multilingual repertoires, and are entangled in complex desires and strategies of mobility

Globalization in the margins

http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/39a4b586-f3ba-467a-a976-48e6eaf453f9_TPCS_73_Wang-etal.pd

Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile

Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society

This book aims to enhance and challenge our understanding of language and literacy as social practice against the background of heightened globalisation. Juffermans presents an ethnographic study of the linguistic landscape of The Gambia, arguing that language should be conceptualised as a verb (languaging) rather than a countable noun (a language, languages). He goes on to argue that sociolinguistics should not be defined as the study of ‘who speaks what language to whom, and when and to what end’ (as Fishman defined it), but as the study of who uses which linguistic features under particular circumstances in a particular place and time. The book is therefore in part an exercise to unpluralise language, which Juffermans argues is necessary for a more realistic understanding of what language is, what it does, and what people do with it. The book will be of interest to sociolinguistics researchers, especially those focusing on Africa and the global South