Page 73 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
which one can express absolutely everything. It’s a kind of voluntary submission to the assumed a priori superiority of a European language.
In the former French and Portuguese colonies, indigenous languages were never allowed, not even in elementary schools. That was due to the colonial doctrine of assimilation of the colonised populations to become “black French” and “black Portuguese”.
The British had a different approach, which ultimately resulted in apartheid and segregation. They allowed to teach for the first three years in local languages, assuming that this was enough time for the children to learn English well enough to switch the teaching completely to English. This, as experts know, does not work: a minimum of six to eight years is needed to acquire a foreign language good enough for it to be used for teaching and learning purposes.
And that’s how it has remained in Africa until today, with few exceptions, such as Ethiopia, where they allow to teach up to nine years through Ethiopian languages before switching to English.
That sounds like a reasonable approach...
Yes, it sounds good in theory. But when I worked and researched in Ethiopia, I realised that it did not work very well. Even after nine years exposure to English through the medium of an Ethiopian mother tongue, the students' English is still not good enough for higher levels of education, and certainly not for universities. The main reason being the poor quality of the teachers who teach English during primary and early secondary education.
But European universities tend to switch to English, too. What’s wrong with that?
I'm not saying that's wrong; in Europe, all pre-university education is done through a language that is the mother tongue of almost all learners. But for Africa I say it doesn’t work, because already pre-university education is based on teaching through a foreign language. You see, learning in a foreign language is ultimately ineffective, if you do not speak that language very well. African students may be able to have simple conversations in the foreign language, but they are hardly able to acquire academic knowledge via this language. Their language proficiency is just not good enough. Students will memorise texts and reproduce them correctly, without really understanding the content of what they are reproducing. That is the main reason for the overall failure of postcolonial African educational systems. Individual development of cognitive and creative abilities of students can hardly take place under such circumstances, because learning effects remain poor.
Volume 23 Number 1 Page 73