Multilingualism And Education In Africa

This book is a must-read for every language teaching professional and researcher working in a multilingual context. Multilingualism and Education in Africa: The State of the State of the Art is an up-to-date exploration and wide-ranging review of the symbiotic relationship between multilingualism and education in Africa. The African continent is rich in languages. Most of her inhabitants are multilingual and many of the nations have embraced multilingual education. This book examines multilingualism in education from three broad perspectives: multilingualism and language in education policy in Africa; multilingualism as an educational resource in Africa; and attitudes and challenges of multilingualism and education in Africa. The book’s nineteen chapters discuss these three perspectives from East, West, Central and South Africa. All the contributors are leading authorities in multilingualism and education. The chapters combine a wide range of viewpoints based on theoretical, empirical and personal experiences. The reader is left with a deeper understanding of the unique features of multilingualism and education in Africa that have seldom been addressed by those who experience them first-hand. The book demonstrates successful practices in multilingualism and education; showing how African nations have determined what works for them without ignoring challenges such as policies on paper, attitudes towards African languages and limited resources. The benefits of multilingual education override the challenges. The book’s extensive coverage makes it an important resource for scholars and policy makers in the field of multilingualism and education. Overall, this book represents an important contribution to an important subject in education globally. The editors have provided an introductory overview to the book and commentaries on the three sections.

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.

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.

This publication sets out to give content to the debate about multilingual education by providing both a conceptual framework and example of successful practice in bi/multilingual classrooms. Based on the firm belief in the maintenance and development of first-language medium of instruction throughout schooling, and on the need to learn at least a second language, the book argues strongly in favour of a policy of additive bi/multilingualism for formal schooling.

This book is a must-read for every language teaching professional and researcher working in a multilingual context. Multilingualism and Education in Africa: The State of the State of the Art is an up-to-date exploration and wide-ranging review of the symbiotic relationship between multilingualism and education in Africa. The African continent is rich in languages. Most of her inhabitants are multilingual and many of the nations have embraced multilingual education. This book examines multilingualism in education from three broad perspectives: multilingualism and language in education policy in Africa; multilingualism as an educational resource in Africa; and attitudes and challenges of multilingualism and education in Africa. The bookâ (TM)s nineteen chapters discuss these three perspectives from East, West, Central and South Africa. All the contributors are leading authorities in multilingualism and education. The chapters combine a wide range of viewpoints based on theoretical, empirical and personal experiences. The reader is left with a deeper understanding of the unique features of multilingualism and education in Africa that have seldom been addressed by those who experience them first-hand. The book demonstrates successful practices in multilingualism and education; showing how African nations have determined what works for them without ignoring challenges such as policies on paper, attitudes towards African languages and limited resources. The benefits of multilingual education override the challenges. The bookâ (TM)s extensive coverage makes it an important resource for scholars and policy makers in the field of multilingualism and education. Overall, this book represents an important contribution to an important subject in education globally. The editors have provided an introductory overview to the book and commentaries on the three sections.

This book interrogates and problematises African multilingualism as it is currently understood in language education and research. It challenges the enduring colonial matrices of power hidden within mainstream conceptions of multilingualism that have been propagated in the Global North and then exported to the Global South under the aegis of colonial modernity and pretensions of universal epistemic relevance. The book contributes new points of method, theory and interpretation that will advance scholarly conversations on decolonial epistemology by introducing the notion of coloniality of language - a summary term that describes the ways in which notions of language and multilingualism in post-colonial societies remain colonial. The authors begin the process of mapping out what a socially realistic notion of multilingualism would look like if we took into account the voices of marginalised and ignored African communities of practice - both on the African continent and in the diasporas.

This edited volume provides the follow up to Erling et al.’s (2021) Multilingual Learning and Language Supportive Pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The strategies put forward in Volume 1 included multilingual pedagogies that allow students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires, translanguaging and other language supportive pedagogies. While there is great traction in the pedagogical strategies proposed in Volume 1, limited progress has been made in terms of multilingual education in SSA. Thus, the main focus of this follow-up volume is to explore the question of why former colonial languages and monolingual approaches continue to be used as the dominant languages of education, even when we have multilingual pedagogies and materials that could and do work and despite substantial evidence that learners have difficulties when taught in a language they do not understand. This book offers perspectives to answer this question through focusing on the internal and external pressures which impact the capacity for implementing multilingual strategies in educational contexts at regional, national, and community levels. Chapters provide insights into how to better understand and work within these contemporary constraints and challenge dominant monoglossic discourses which inhibit the implementation of multilingual education in SSA. The volume focuses on three main areas which have proven to be stumbling blocks to the effective implementation of multilingual education to date, namely: Assessment, Ideology and Policy. An insightful collection that will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of language education, language-in-education policy and educational assessments in the wide range of multilingual contexts in Africa.