Languages in Africa

Multilingualism, Language Policy, and Education

Elizabeth C. Zsiga, One Tlale Boyer, Ruth Kramer, Elizabeth C. Zsiga, One Tlale Boyer, Ruth Kramer

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781626161528
• eBook ISBN: 9781626161535
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

People in many African communities live within a series of concentric circles when it comes to language. In a small group, a speaker uses an often unwritten and endangered mother tongue that is rarely used in school. A national indigenous language—written, widespread, sometimes used in school—surrounds it. An international language like French or English, a vestige of colonialism, carries prestige, is used in higher education, and promises mobility—and yet it will not be well known by its users.

The essays in Languages in Africa explore the layers of African multilingualism as they affect language policy and education. Through case studies ranging across the continent, the contributors consider multilingualism in the classroom as well as in domains ranging from music and film to politics and figurative language. The contributors report on the widespread devaluing and even death of indigenous languages. They also investigate how poor teacher training leads to language-related failures in education. At the same time, they demonstrate that education in a mother tongue can work, linguists can use their expertise to provoke changes in language policies, and linguistic creativity thrives in these multilingual communities.

1

Early Reading Success in Africa: The Language Factor

BARBARA TRUDELL AND CAROLYN TEMPLE ADGER
SIL Africa and Center for Applied Linguistics

TO THE CASUAL EYE, the two domains of literacy and linguistics may not seem closely linked. In fact, however, concerns about reading and writing competencies do intersect with the field of linguistics, particularly where unwritten or recently written languages are being developed for written use in learning and communication. This situation is particularly common in the language-rich regions of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. For this reason, understanding the role of linguistics in developing written-language competencies is becoming increasingly critical to successful reading and writing acquisition across the two-thirds (or developing) world.

Reading competencies have become central in discussions of international education and development. In the last decade of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals, attention has focused increasingly on the quality of education rather than solely on access to education (EFA Global Monitoring Report Team 2005). In this environment the ability to accurately assess the quality of education has taken on new importance, and user-friendly mechanisms for measuring learning are being sought. An increasingly popular means of assessing the quality of learning in developing-world classrooms is the assessment of students’ ability to read. The rationale here is that if a child is not reading, he or she is probably not learning other content either—at least not to the degree desired.¹ Thus, literacy learning in early primary grades becomes central to the assessment of learning in general.

A related issue arises in environments where the language of instruction in the primary classroom is not one that the students have mastered. This is typical in countries that are former colonies, where the colonial language has been designated the official language despite limited national-level proficiency in that language. In such an environment, reading—which is arguably centered on the comprehension of, and on interaction with, a written text—becomes a difficult goal to reach. This linguistic challenge is not always recognized by those responsible for ensuring student learning. Even when the challenge is recognized, it is difficult to accommodate the need to build new knowledge and skills out of what children already know—especially their language resources—as well as the demand for children to learn an official language, which opens doors to economic and educational choices and opportunities.

At present, a degree of support exists in some quarters for mother-tongue-based bilingual education that involves teaching reading skills first in the child’s language rather than in an international language that the child is unlikely to speak. Large donor agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and others that together constitute the Global Partnership for Education are demonstrating varying degrees of resourcing support for country plans to develop mother-tongue-based early literacy programs and to ensure that they thrive (USAID 2011; Global Partnership for Education 2012).

Certainly in Africa the demands of improving education, the current centrality of reading instruction to this undertaking, and the large number of African languages that are unwritten or recently written are opening a space for linguistic expertise to contribute to success in reading and in education generally. Deep knowledge of language structure is crucial to the processes involved in developing reading and writing programs, assessing students’ reading performance, and reforming the systems that support the teaching of reading and writing. Linguistic expertise constitutes a significant resource for a range of activities related to literacy learning: engaging with the development of phonemic awareness and phonics skills in the primary school reading curriculum, the revision of language courses so that they are directly relevant to children’s literacy learning, and testing pupil performance. Linguistic input is in fact essential for the entire range of language development activities that support literacy in African languages—including the standardization and development of orthographies, dictionaries, and grammar descriptions.

Reading Research and Program Development in Africa: Where Are the Linguists?

Given the role of African linguists over the years in advocating on behalf of African languages in African education (e.g., Bamgboşe 1991; Ouane 2003), it is reasonable to expect that linguists would also be central to the wave of early grade literacy education reform sweeping across Africa. And indeed, African linguists have been at the heart of some landmark African-language education initiatives, including the distinguished scholars Aliu Babs Fafunwa in Nigeria (Fafunwa, Macauley, and Funnso Sokoya 1989), Neville Alexander in South Africa (Alexander 2005), and Maurice Tadadjeu and his colleagues at the University of Yaoundé (Tadadjeu 1990). However, the development and management of education curricula have not typically been seen to need linguistic input. This is equally true in the teacher training institutions, which should ideally serve as the preparation grounds for effective multilingual education. If linguists do have a role in training or curriculum development, that role is often limited to teaching language structure, which is more relevant to teaching language arts than to teaching reading (Akyeampong et al. 2011).

In the United States involvement by theoretical linguists and sociolinguists in reading research and program development for children has been more visible. Linguists have been involved in research on reading and vernacular dialects (e.g., Labov and Baker 2010), a domain in which language structure is foregrounded in explaining reading difficulties. Psycholinguistics has contributed to theories of reading, as has the field of orthography studies (e.g., Templeton and Bear 1992; Snowling and Hulme 2005; Smith 2011). Such linguistic research has contributed to the design and implementation of reading instructional programs in the formal education curriculum over a number of years.

In fact, reading research in the United States has been extensive—so much so that in the late 1990s, the National Reading Panel was commissioned to review the enormous body of research on reading instruction. The panel’s report has been widely accepted as an authoritative account of the implications of this research for reading instruction (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 2000). The panel focused on five elements that have been found to be key for learning to read, at least in the language contexts studied:

Phonemic awareness: the ability to focus on the phonemic structure of words;

Phonics: the alphabetic principle and knowledge of the correspondence between the sounds of a language and print;

Reading fluency: the ability to read a text with speed, accuracy, and appropriate prosody;

Vocabulary: knowledge of the words in a text and their meanings; and

Reading comprehension: the ability to process a text and interpret its meaning.

These five skills have become the touchstone for designing reading programs in the United States, and reading program implementers from the United States have brought these principles to bear on African-language reading instruction programs as well.

In African countries where relatively little research is taking place on reading in African languages, the research base for informing and reforming literacy acquisition has largely been imported from Europe and the United States. However, its appropriateness for designing reading programs and assessments in African contexts and African languages is questionable (Trudell and Schroeder 2007). The research reviewed by the National Reading Panel pertained to children who are learning to read in their first language, English. However, the many structural differences between English, an Indo-European language, and the African languages, which belong to many other language families, raise questions about how the elements of reading that have been examined through research in the United States might best be addressed in the curriculum, instruction, and assessment in African schools.

Thus, with regard to linguistics and reading in African languages, a few points seem clear. First, linguistics has informed some reading research to date, but the language environment of this research has in general been English or another European language. Second, the research that is informing reading instructional programs in African nations tends not to be indigenous, and so is not shaped by African linguistic realities. It is the contention of this chapter that these two conditions could and should be changed through the addition of a distinctly African and distinctly linguistic perspective on reading methodology in Africa. The remainder of the chapter presents examples of the possibilities for such contributions.

The Impact of Various Linguistic Features on Reading Methodology

The goal of reading instruction is to promote reading for meaning. Ready processing of word parts, whole words, and larger chunks of text as well is a matter of the reader gaining automatic recognition of the most relevant and productive sequences of symbols (letters, characters, character combinations and strings, suprasegmentals, etc.). However, the most relevant and productive symbols vary from language to language, as do a range of other orthographic features.

One distinctive characteristic of many African languages is a high degree of orthographic transparency. Reading such languages can be productively taught through a focus on syllables, sound–symbol relationships, and blending. In contrast, a language featuring greater orthographic depth lends itself to a reading method that emphasizes sight words and morpheme recognition as well as sound–symbol correspondence. Morpheme recognition skills, including the recognition of infixes, are also very important for being able to fluently read agglutinative languages.

Another orthographic feature of many African languages is underdifferentiation. Tone, vowels, vowel length, and other phonological and grammatical features that are not typically marked in European languages have tended to be ignored as these languages have been reduced to writing. This has tended to occur particularly where linguistic expertise has not contributed significantly to the process.

Other features of a language that affect reading methodology include syllable complexity and morphological complexity. An important aspect of building reading fluency involves focusing on morpheme shape as conditioned by the various noun classes and on the fact that the different morpheme shapes maintain the same meaning.

One other example of the linguistic dimension of reading instruction has to do with the various types of scripts in which African languages are written: Latin, Arabic, and Ethiopic, as well as indigenous scripts in some West African languages. The unique features of each of these scripts have different implications for reading instruction. A bias in favor of Latin script may lead Western-trained educators to assume that it is the easiest script for learning to read; however, evidence from research in Ethiopia (Piper and Van Ginkel 2013) indicates that the Ethiopic script may actually be more effective than Latin script in facilitating the application of symbol recognition skills to word reading.

The larger lesson, then, is that effective reading pedagogy in a language other than English requires an understanding of the unique linguistic characteristics of the language. It cannot be assumed that teaching reading is best done the same way in African languages as it is in English. Linguistic input into the development and implementation of reading methodology can make the difference between a student learning to read easily and that same student struggling to gain reading capability.

The Relevance of Linguistics to Reading Assessment

Reading assessment—in both international languages and African languages—has become a regular component of educational interventions in Africa. In particular, assessment tools based on the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) (Gove and Wetterberg 2011) are being included in donor-funded education projects across the continent. The EGRA tool and other tools based on this kind of rapid assessment of reading skills are being used to evaluate overall literacy program effectiveness—and individual classrooms as well. However, as these tools are being developed and applied in African-language-medium classrooms, the linguistic components of such testing are not always given due attention.

As an example, oral reading fluency is one dimension of the EGRA; the links between oral reading fluency and comprehension (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 2000) make it a particularly productive skill to measure. Reading fluency is typically measured in terms of words per minute (WPM); in the United States the general expectation is that, by the end of first grade, children should be reading in English at an average rate of 50 WPM (Hasbrouck and Tindal 2006). As with other aspects of reading research and practice, this notion of a target WPM rate has also made its way into the curriculum and testing expectations of some African nations.

Three language-related challenges present themselves here, however. One has to do with the child’s proficiency in the language of testing. Where a child is being tested in a language that he or she has not mastered (which is frequently the case in African classrooms), the test results will not distinguish between the child who cannot read well and the child who has not mastered the language in which he or she is being tested. Conversely, if the child is tested in a language in which he or she has not been taught to read (which occurs where testing is done in a language that the child does speak but that has not actually been used as the medium of reading instruction), the results are again difficult to interpret. Thus, it is important to establish the degree of each child’s oral proficiency in the language(s) of testing.

A second linguistic challenge has to do with the establishment of a universal WPM target for measuring fluency. It is well known among linguists that word length varies from language to language, due to both the linguistic structures and the writing conventions of languages around the world. The follow...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Layers of Language—Some Bad News and Some Good News on Multilingualism, Language Policy, and Education in Africa
• 1 Early Reading Success in Africa: The Language Factor
• 2 Multilingualism as a Sociolinguistic Phenomenon: Evidence from Africa
• 3 Classroom Discourse in Bilingual and Multilingual Kenyan Primary Schools
• 4 Investigating Teacher Effects in Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education Programs
• 5 Ghana’s Complementary Education Program
• 6 Language Contact and Language Attitudes in Two Dagara-Speaking Border Communities in Burkina Faso and Ghana
• 7 Language and Education Policy in Botswana: The Case of Sebirwa
• 8 Ethnic Language Shift among the Nao People of Ethiopia
• 9 The Role of Language and Culture in Ethnic Identity Maintenance: The Case of the Gujarati Community in South Africa
• 10 “The Palm Oil with Which Words Are Eaten”: Proverbs from Cameroon’s Endangered Indigenous Languages
• 11 The Linguistic “Glocal” in Nigeria’s Urban Popular Music
• 12 Language Use in Advertisements as a Reflection of Speakers’ Language Habits
• 13 The Persuasive Nature of Metaphors in Kenya’s Political Discourse
• 14 African Languages on Film: Visualizations of Pathologized Polyglossia
• Contributors
• Index