Kensaku Ogata
I’m doing a research assistantship in a project designing and implementing pedagogical strategies for addressing Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Agricultural Colleges in Ethiopia. Since I have found some articles relevant to code-switching, I would like to share one of them and to receive your feedback:
This article is about English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana. Let me briefly explain the context and participants, methodology, research questions, and main findings.
This study was carried out in a primary 4 classroom at Tomso basic public schools in Kumasi, Ghana. At this school, the pupils in this study were in primary 1 when the English-only policy was introduced in 2002.
The researcher conducted a qualitative ethnographic case study: (1) classroom observations of teacher and pupils interactions and (2) interviews and focus-group discussions with pupils.
The study inquires how the use of English- an unfamiliar language- creates anxiety among students and stalls effective classroom participation. The author first considers the key issues that impinge on the literacy development in multilingual classrooms in postcolonial Africa including the uninformed attitudes towards mother tongue/bilingual education.
As a main finding, the author mentioned that this study provided practical evidence to refute the so-called limitations of bilingualism and highlighted the benefits of mother-tongue/bilingual education. The language of communication in the classroom is vital for the achievement of literacy and learning goals.
However, what I would like to point out here is that much of the classroom talk about texts, according to the classroom observations of teacher and pupil interactions, was teacher-based, as many of pupils are unable to communicate fluently in English. Besides, teachers’ feedback is very scarce both in quality and quantity. Also, safe talk (pupils avoid the risk of loss of face for the teacher) is seen in the classroom. Most importantly, English-only language-in-education policy launched in 2002 in Ghana might prevent pupils from acquiring their local language(s). And my concern is this policy may erode their culture(s) as well.
One of the solutions I came up with is “teacher training” which provides English teachers in Ghana with adequate knowledge on teaching pedagogies. By doing so, Ghana does not have to set an English-only language-in-education policy, and instead, there will be a better way for both their local languages and English coexist.
I would like to receive any feedback on this, and if you have an interest, please have a quick look at this article (see link; McGill students can access the article through their library account). Thank you.
References
Opoku-Amankwa, K. (2009). English-only language-in-education policy in multilingual classrooms in Ghana. Language Culture and Curriculum, 22(2), 121–135.
Thanks Ken for calling our attention to this sociolinguistically interesting (and, alas, all too typical) situation. Many African countries—and other places where the colonizers have left, but the problems resulting from many years of economic/linguistic colonization have not—struggle with exactly this problem in, I would imagine, many thousands of classrooms worldwide. The first step is for people outside those classrooms to become more aware of the challenges such children face.