Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Language education policy in post-colonial Africa 191
that much-needed improvements in educational quality require not just changes in
policy but simultaneous micro-level change in educational practices, in resource
provision and the implementation of policy, the two being interdependent. As
Cummins (1998) has pointed out (see Chapter 3), use of the home language is
no educational panacea; bilingual education can be effectively as well as poorly
delivered. Thus, while the use of a familiar indigenous language medium may well,
the evidence suggests, 10 make a substantial contribution to improved educational
performance, this contribution is most likely to be realised if it is accompanied by
other necessary changes. Too great a burden of expectation placed on policy reform,
or, indeed, change in any one single factor, is likely, experience suggests, to lead only
to disappointment.
7.2.2.4 The influence of higher education
Talk here of educational infrastructure leads us to a final factor constraining changes
in instructional media at secondary level, the influence, namely, of higher education.
The reason this is significant is that the different levels of the education system
interlock, the output of one level generally constituting the input of another, with
lower levels often seen as preparatory in some measure for the level immediately
above. The effect is that higher levels of education tend to exert considerable, often
undue, influence on curricular provision at the level below. Thus, where English (or
some other former colonial language) is the medium at university, as it so often is in
post-colonial Africa11 – especially in science and social science subjects – pressure
develops for that language to be employed also as a medium at secondary school. The
pressure comes largely from parents and pupils, who harbour aspirations, no matter
how unrealistic in practice, of progressing to university; and is evident not just
in Africa but beyond. In Hong Kong, for instance, this is one of the factors, along
with the economic, that explains parental demand for English medium secondary
education, even where many, perhaps most, understand the educational benefits of
the mother tongue medium (Tsui 2004: 100).
One could argue, of course, that effective teaching of English as a secondary
school subject could, and should, equip students with the requisite proficiency to
study through English at university. Experience suggests, however, that this is unduly
optimistic, as is illustrated by the Malaysian case. Here, the 1993 reintroduction of
English medium for science, technical and medical courses at public universities12 placed the Malay medium secondary sector under increased pressure to deliver
students with sufficient proficiency to cope with university level study in English. For
a time, EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses were entrusted with remedying
the shortfalls in the proficiency of students entering university, but in 2002, realising
that that this was insufficient in an era of higher education expansion, the government
took the decision to extend English medium to science and mathematics at
secondary school (Gill 2004: 150).
In Africa, meanwhile, concern that students graduating from nominally English
medium secondary schools possess insufficient proficiency to cope with university