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Language education policy in post-colonial Africa 189 It may be, then, that linguistic development and enhanced prestige is a consequent of, rather than a necessary condition for, the adoption of a language as a medium of education. 7.2.2.2 Books and learning materials Another much cited practical obstacle to adopting indigenous language media is the relative dearth of textbook and learning materials in these languages, the only solution for which would be the large-scale production, or translation, of books across a range of curricular subjects, a matter not just of finding suitably qualified authors or translators but also the necessary paper, publishers and distributors. Not impossible, of course, but clearly a costly and time-consuming business. Boyle (1995: 294), for example, points out how the 1984 Hong Kong Educational Commission, which recommended the publication of textbooks in both Chinese and English, seriously underestimated the ‘enormity’ of the task. And anyone with experience of donor-supported textbook production projects involving, for example, the supply of a single English language textbook to schools throughout a developing country, can testify to the considerable effort and administration required. Again, this is not to say the provision of textbooks in a new language medium is an insuperable obstacle. Recent developments in desktop publishing technology may help, though, as far as we aware, there is – as yet – no conclusive demonstration of this. It is to say, rather, that implementation of a change of this magnitude, which would additionally involve accustoming teachers to teaching subjects in a language they had not themselves been taught in, would require confidence, commitment and, above all, money – a crucial factor to which we now turn. 7.2.2.3 Financial resources and educational infrastructure Central, and critical, in discussions of media of instruction in the context of the resource-weakened education systems found in parts of Africa is the question of financial resources, to which we have already alluded in previous discussion. Here it is useful at the outset to recall the very adverse conditions in which schooling often takes place. In Malawian and Zambian primary schools, for instance, Williams (1996) depicts the following kind of conditions: large classes of fifty or more pupils and a shortage of desks for pupils to sit at, paralleling a shortage of classrooms with some classes held in the open air as a result. In Ghanaian primary schools, Al-Hassan (personal communication) testifies to not dissimilar conditions: the rationing of teachers’ supplies of chalk and the marked shortage of textbooks. In many countries it is not that unusual for the teacher to hold the only copy of a key textbook. From Mozambique, Benson (2002: 307; 2004: 266) also reports adverse conditions: chronic illness among pupils, and frequent school closures due to strikes or teacher absence. Across a swathe of countries teachers are poorly paid and frequently poorly trained, if at all (see Cleghorn and Rollnick 2002: 350 on Kenya), and it is
190 Language Planning and Education unsurprising, therefore, that the methods employed to teach the second/foreign language often leave much to be desired. Finally, many primary school systems are characterised by high drop-out rates and less than universal enrolment, particularly among girls. Secondary schools, meanwhile, tend to cater to a small, relatively select sector of the age-population. This somewhat depressing catalogue of problems has not been assembled for its own sake, however, but to make three main points. The first is that ministries of education in sub-Saharan Africa have many problems to cope with and many competing spending priorities. Given the conditions outlined above, and their fundamental task of delivering basic education to the population, it would be unsurprising, even justifiable, if they elected to commit their available financial resources to the improvement of the basic educational infrastructure – books, desks, teacher-training – rather than to a change of instructional medium, necessary though that might also be. Second, given the scale of spending required to ameliorate school conditions, and given the fact that in many countries as much as 90 per cent of the primary education budget is allocated to recurrent expenditure on teachers’ salaries – leaving little over for books, equipment or maintenance, it is likely that a policy directed at changing the medium of instruction, whether at primary or secondary level, would require substantial multilateral or bilateral external donor support. Whether such support will be forthcoming, however, is an uncertain and controversial matter. Mazrui (2004: 45) for example, alleges that the World Bank speaks with a forked tongue on this matter, espousing – on the one hand – a rhetoric supportive of the use of the mother tongue in early primary education but refraining, on the other, from committing resources to the ‘linguistic Africanisation of all primary education’ because it has, Mazrui (2004: 49) claims, a vested interest in the maintenance of European languages of instruction. Comparatively little empirical evidence is advanced, however, to support the stronger of these claims. Certainly, there are good grounds for believing that past structural adjustment policies 9 of the IMF-World Bank were not helpful to educational development, and that the World Bank has taken little interest in pushing forward an agenda of ‘linguistic Africanisation’ beyond the initial stages of primary school. But there are indications that it is prepared to fund experimental programmes using local languages as media in early primary education, the primary bilingual education project in Mozambique (1993–97) being a case in point (Benson 2000: 50). The third and perhaps most important point is that, given the circumstances described above, we need to question the proposition that a change to an indigenous language medium at upper primary or secondary level would of itself resolve the problems of educational underachievement, whose causes are, in fact, more plausibly conceived of as multiple, including: imperfect understanding of the language in which instruction is delivered, a lack of books and learning materials, the ineffective teaching of English as a subject, inappropriate syllabuses and teaching methodologies and the variable quality of teachers. In view of this complex causality, it seems likely
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Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Ling
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viii Series Editors’ Preface Each
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Acknowledgements Identifying and th
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