Page 74 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
The solution is undisputed among professionals: In Africa, we need multilingual education systems in which the major world languages – such as English, French, Arabic, and maybe eventually Chinese – play their part, but as languages to be learned as subjects, not by using them as teaching medium! As a medium, you should always use the language that is best mastered by the learners, and in Africa these are the African mother tongues. Ultimately, which languages to choose has to be decided case by case, from province to province, village to village, sometimes even from school to school.
Unfortunately and most often, teachers, parents and even the learners are trapped in a dilemma. If you ask them whether they want teaching through, for instance, Xhosa or English, they always choose English, hoping that through knowing English one can eventually get a better job and make more money. However, if they were offered education in both languages, including the one they use at home, then exactly that would be the parents’ favourite choice. But that‘s a choice that‘s rarely being offered by educational authorities. What we need are multilingual systems, where teaching is done through both local and global languages.
But the education systems in the countries are not yet prepared for that.
Unfortunately not. One of the problems is that African authorities subscribe to the 19th century European ideology of “one state – one nation – one language”. They believe in the model of “one language for all”, and that this should be the language of the former colonial master, or Arabic.
The second problem is, that the teachers themselves often speak such poor English that they can only communicate on quite a low level with the learners, who usually don’t speak the language at all upon school-entry. Teachers then often resort to a common African language that they share with the learners in order to allow any communication to take place in class. However, the exams will still have to be passed in English, and most children will fail because of their poor English!
And where it comes to teaching through African languages, the teachers would first have to be taught how to teach through them. It’s not enough to be able to speak these languages in order to also teach them. Currently, most teachers are not prepared professionally to teach in African languages at all. All their training is only in English. But that's a language they often cannot handle sufficiently well in class. So, they remain under-prepared to teach in any of the required languages, be it English or an African one.
Page 74 Volume 23 Number 2