By Barbara Trudell, SIL AFRICA Learning and Development
The joy of reading! Fun new stories, interesting new ideas, and the chance to practice new skills for understanding written text.
But it’s not always so joyful. Trying to learn can be tough – especially when you can’t understand the teacher, you don’t know what’s in the book, and you have no idea what’s going on. This happens more than people think; the World Bank estimates that 37% of schoolchildren around the world are being taught in a language of instruction that they don’t speak.
Having spent the past 30 years researching and promoting the use of local languages for learning, first in Latin America and then in Africa, I can say that one of the main reasons for this unhelpful pedagogical practice is that national education policy often doesn’t take children’s home languages into account in setting parameters for the language of instruction. In many multilingual nations of the global South, language policy for formal education is shaped by national priorities other than learning. When politics and pedagogy conflict around the language of schooling, pedagogy usually loses.
This blog post explores the critical role of language in education policy, focusing on The Gambia as a case study, which I wrote to feed into the GEM Report-AU-ADEA 2024 Spotlight Report on FLN in Africa. Why The Gambia? Because this nation is boldly rethinking its approach to education by prioritizing the use of local languages in early grades. This shift in policy, driven by a commitment to improving learning outcomes and strengthening national identity, offers valuable lessons for other multilingual countries seeking to create more equitable and inclusive education systems.
Some key issues
For anyone committed to helping to provide better education to kids around the world, it’s important to be aware of the key issues related to language, learning and national policy choices. They include:
- National identity and aspirations: Which language or languages reflect what citizens – and their leaders – want their nation to be? Certain languages may represent modernity, sophistication and educational success more than others, and that is why they are chosen for use in schools. Even when national policy promotes the use of non-dominant home languages of instruction in school, it is often met with noncompliance and skepticism about how well those languages will really get children through the formal education system.
On the other hand, where national identity is grounded in the languages and cultures of the nation, language of instruction choices look very different. Parents may still want to see their children ultimately learning, and learning in, international languages; but a supportive policy space for the use of indigenous or national languages of instruction is also evident.
- The reality of language mastery among young learners: Young learners across the global South rarely speak or understand international languages well enough to learn in them. This can result in real implementation problems for policy that doesn’t take it into account. Nevertheless, surprisingly often the limits of pupils’ language fluencies are ignored – to the detriment of their learning. So, a primary-grade curriculum that mandates the exclusive use of an international language from pre-school onward, and even expects that young pupils will be able to learn additional foreign languages too, is a recipe for school failure, school dropout and some very confused kids.
- The idea that nondominant languages are ‘similar’ enough to be used as languages of instruction for children from several different language communities. Linguistic similarity between two languages isn’t the same as mutual intelligibility – just ask an English person living in Denmark! Nevertheless, the challenges of building an effective home language-medium education program may cause policymakers to decide that a certain language is ‘close enough’ to the home language of monolingual children, and that the kids can just ‘learn’ in that language. It’s not true. A 2024 study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo examined pupils’ language fluencies in the Congolese languages they were being taught in – and found that a large percentage of those kids couldn’t even speak the language of instruction.
The Gambia’s strategy
In the West African nation of The Gambia, I spent some time working on a background paper for the 2024 Spotlight Report on foundational literacy and numeracy, Learning Counts to see how all of these issues – and more – are being addressed in the development and implementation of a new language in education policy: replacing an English-only language of instruction policy with a policy that supports local language-medium learning for children, from early childhood education through grade 3. Gambian education experts say that the use of only English in the formal education system has done a great deal of damage to the country over the years and this new policy demonstrates the country’s determination to end that damage to its young learners and their communities.
The new policy responds to two serious concerns of the Gambian government:
- Concern about the low school performance of Gambian children. As early as the 1970s, researchers have been drawing links between poor academic performance in Gambian schools and the language of instruction being used.
- The conviction that the current English-focused language in education policy and practices are hindering the maintenance of a strong national identity among Gambian citizens. That identity is multilingual, but the exclusion of Gambian languages in the classroom runs counter to national values of inclusion and identity.
These two problems of school failure and neglect of the Gambia’s multilingual national identity are inextricably linked; they are problems that cannot be solved with simply another English-medium curriculum.
Implementing this new policy will mean that seven national languages across the country will be used for teaching the entire lower basic curriculum: early-grade reading, mathematics, science and integrated social studies. English as a second language (ESL) will be taught through Grade 3, to prepare the learners for Grade 4, which will be a year-long process of transitioning from Gambian languages of instruction to English. Many so-called “transition” multilingual education programs don’t give the learners more than a few weeks (if that much) to switch from the home language to an international language of instruction; so this commitment to a year-long curriculum for making that transition is pretty exciting!
It’s not a small task that The Gambia facing, to implement this innovative language in education policy in every early primary classroom in the country. Still, the benefits to learners, their communities and their nation will be great, as young learners develop into confident, successful students – as well as confident, thoughtful citizens.
