Multilingual Learning and Language Supportive Pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Elizabeth J. Erling, John Clegg, Casmir M. Rubagumya, Colin Reilly, Elizabeth J. Erling, John Clegg, Casmir M. Rubagumya, Colin Reilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000379471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This edited collection provides unprecedented insight into the emerging field of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Multilingual education is claimed to have many benefits, amongst which are that it can improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the medium of instruction and are consequently struggling to learn. The book represents a range of Sub-Saharan school contexts and describes how multilingual strategies have been developed and implemented within them to support the learning of content and language. It looks at multilingual learning from several points of view, including 'translanguaging', or the use of multiple languages – and especially African languages – for learning and language-supportive pedagogy, or the implementation of a distinct pedagogy to support learners working through the medium of a second language.

The book puts forward strategies for creating materials, classroom environments and teacher education programmes which support the use of all of a student's languages to improve language and content learning. The contexts which the book describes are challenging, including low school resourcing, poverty and low literacy in the home, and school policy which militates against the use of African languages in school. The volume also draws on multilingual education approaches which have been successfully carried out in higher resource countries and lend themselves to being adapted for use in SSA. It shows how multilingual learning can bring about transformation in education and provides inspiration for how these strategies might spread and be further developed to improve learning in schools in SSA and beyond.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

1

Introduction

Multilingual learning and language supportive pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Elizabeth J. Erling, John Clegg, Casmir M. Rubagumya and Colin Reilly

DOI: 10.4324/9781003028383-1

Introduction

The starting point of the volume is that multilingual learning offers a means of achieving both better learning outcomes in Sub-Saharan African schools and social justice in education (García & Wei, 2013; Heugh, 2015; Kerfoot & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2015; McKinney, 2017). We conceive of multilingual learning as the practice of welcoming and using students’ entire language repertoire as a resource for learning, with this repertoire consisting of linguistic varieties, dialects, discursive genres, registers, styles or accents, gesture, multimodal language practices, at whatever level of proficiency (Blommaert, 2010). This position entails an understanding of multilingualism as a resource (Cenoz & Gorter, 2015; Chimbutane, 2018; Weber, 2014). We take the view that using multilingual approaches offers the potential to improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the official language of instruction (LOI) and are consequently struggling to learn. Whether in a strictly balanced form of bilingual education in which two languages have official status, or in a context where only one language is prescribed as the official LOI, multilingual learning has the potential to facilitate the transition from learning in a familiar language to learning in one which is less familiar.

The volume focuses on contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), following the United Nation’s classification of referring to the 46 countries that are fully or partially located below the Sahara. This region is the one in which most of the global poor live and which hosts 27 of the world’s 28 poorest countries, all with a poverty rate above 30% (Patel, 2018). Multilingualism has often been framed as a problem obstructing the provision of indigenous language education, national and regional cohesion and economic development (Arcand & Grin, 2013; Brock-Utne & Mercer, 2014). Although there are many commonalities between countries in the region, these national contexts are variable in many respects that have a bearing on education: with regard to sociolinguistic diversity, national wealth, presence of a private school sector, political stability, labour markets, analytical capabilities of Ministries of Education, degree of urbanisation and history of ethnic tensions. Not able to deal with the diversity of situations between countries in SSA in their entirety, the volume covers many of these aspects in contributions from Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, the Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

The volume focuses on formal education at the pre-primary, primary and secondary levels, in SSA. While many of the findings and implications have relevance in contexts where any international language serves as the language of education (whether English, French or Portuguese), this volume primarily deals with contexts in which English is the dominant official LOI in the state education system. Many of these countries are former British colonies, with English being a legacy of colonialist educational policies. However, the volume also includes examples from countries which have transferred from having other international post-colonial languages playing the dominant role in education to English. This includes Rwanda, which transferred from French medium to English medium after the 1994 genocide and the Seychelles (the African country with the smallest population), which was also previously French medium. While there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution for all of these contexts, we point to similar educational challenges in the region that might be mediated by multilingual education.

The contexts in SSA described in this volume can be considered ‘low resource’, as capacity constraints around resources – for individuals, schools and communities – inhibit the quality and equity of learning and teaching. In these contexts, LOI, while central to academic success, is just one of a number of challenges facing education, with others being situations in which learners are unable to effectively engage with education due to malnutrition, school buildings lacking appropriate infrastructure, an absence of adequate textbooks and learning materials, and a substantial shortage of teachers (Moon, 2013). For the teachers in place, many also live and work with limited resources and are unable to access quality professional development. The implementational tasks of Ministries of Education are formidable and to a considerable extent a matter of allocating scarce resources between competing priorities. Not wishing to be naïve about the many obstacles for so many people ‘to do and be what they have reason to value’ (Sen, 1999), we attempt in this volume not to take a deficit approach to language and education in SSA by focusing only on the many obstacles, but to draw attention to the ways in which multilingual education is both possible and necessary to be implemented in such contexts. This volume provides examples of promising practices which are already taking place within SSA, highlighting what can be done to produce more positive and beneficial learning experiences within these contexts of limited resource. It provides inspiration for how these practices might spread, be scaled up and be further developed to improve learning in schools in SSA and beyond.

In the first part of this chapter, we provide a general overview of the challenges for learning in schools in SSA and how they are related to languages of instruction. Without pretending to provide a comprehensive overview, we explore some of the key issues influencing the formulation and delivery of language-in-education policies in SSA and point to some of the reasons for their failure. In the second part of this chapter, we explore the theoretical positionings of multilingual learning that underpin the chapters in the volume. We close this chapter by introducing the themes and chapters that follow, which offer explorations of multilingual classroom practices, resources and teacher education initiatives that have been found to enhance content and language learning.

Context and background

With most of the global poor living in SSA (Patel, 2018), every collection about education in the region starts by citing the high levels of poverty, the large number of people living on less than $2.00 a day (ca. 413 million people, or 41% of the population) and the low literacy rates (an average of one-third of the population cannot read or write) (World Bank, 2020). Despite considerable economic progress (IMF, 2018), poverty in SSA is multidimensional and widespread, and likely to have been made far worse by the economic crisis ensuing from COVID-19 (Gerszon et al., 2020).

Education is generally recognised as having the potential to contribute to the post-colonial development of countries across SSA, with indigenous languages playing an important role (Alexander, 2009; Djité, 2008; Erling & Seargeant, 2013). What has been called ‘mother tongue education’, which is education in the languages that children speak in their homes and local communities, has been promoted by organisations like UNESCO since the 1950s (1953, 2003, 2008) as a means to enhance the effect of early schooling and literacy development. This is in line with international research undertaken in other contexts which has repeatedly found that the prolonged use of children’s home languages in early schooling is critical for cognitive development (e.g. Cummins, 2000; Kosonen, 2005) and can enhance a later switch to bilingual education and education in an additional language. There is widespread recognition of the centrality of the quality of classroom interaction in achieving educational quality, and the role of indigenous African languages in promoting this (Alexander, 2015; Tikly & Barrett, 2011). Scholars investigating various educational contexts in SSA have reinforced these calls for the use of indigenous African languages in education and a large number of studies evidenced that their use can enhance school achievement (Alidou & Brock-Utne, 2011; Rubagumya, 1986, 1994; Smith, 2011; Smits et al., 2008). Using children’s home languages in education has also been found to decrease attrition and increase the likelihood of family and community engagement in the school – all factors that contribute to the effectiveness of students’ learning at school (Trudell, 2016a). Moreover, it has been found to support community cohesion, participation in society, improved access to health, skills development and the growth of the economy (Coleman, 2010; Hanushek & Woessman, 2008). Studies also suggest that the use of international languages in education severely limits students’ abilities to develop foundations for learning – with children from the least developed districts, poor and rural households and ethnic minorities being most likely to be affected (Babaci-Wilhite, 2015; Pflepsen, 2015; Pinnock & Vijayakumar, 2009; Trudell, 2016b). Williams (2014) has convincingly argued that such policies are not only responsible for depressing educational achievement but also contribute to reducing skills development and low economic performance in the region. The high costs of providi...