Volume 12, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Developing Languages in Africa: Social and educational perspectives; Guest Editor: Ross Graham

In Ghana, plurilingual language use is the norm rather than the exception. It follows that the multilingual linguistic practices of bilingual and multilingual Ghanaians should be reflected in language planning and languages-in-education policies. The study explores the nature of Ghana’s complex sociolinguistic ecology and details the shifts in language-in-education policies from the colonial era to the present. A closer look at the policies presents two opposing models: policies that draw on monolingual ideologies involving the use of English only as a medium of instruction from pre-school to higher levels, and policies that promote a bilingual approach where Ghanaian indigenous languages and English are used concurrently in the lower grade classes (grades 1–3), with a transition to English-only instruction from grade 4 onwards. The paper argues that instabilities in languages-in-education policies occur through the effects of ideology and policy formulation that do not take into account the linguistic ecologies of different communities, or indeed, the linguistic ecology of the Ghanaian classroom. It is proposed that rigid policies can be productively modified by recognizing the reality of code-switching in classrooms and shifting focus to the creative learning possibilities that translanguaging opens up.

In 2014, the Government of Malawi announced a new policy under which English would become the medium of instruction from the beginning of primary school. Previously, Chichewa or a relevant local language of wider communication were used as mediums of instruction. Using the notion of “voice” to analyze the new language policy, the paper distinguishes voices from above (government) and voices from below (the people). Embedded within each of the two voices are what can be called “voices of knowledge” and “voices of ignorance”. The paper argues that the new language policy is a deeply retrogressive step, one which reveals how in Africa, myths of English as the language of opportunity and internationalization prevail over voices of knowledge that are based on the conditions of effective learning in multilingual contexts.

This paper explores some of the factors that limit the effectiveness of Uganda’s mother tongue-based education policy, where instruction in lower primary classes is provided in the mother tongue. Using socio-cultural and ethnographic lenses, the paper draws from the experiences of a study implemented by a Ugandan NGO in one primary school in Arua district. Findings revealed weaknesses in implementation of the MTBE policy, highlighting deficiencies in the training of teachers, and lack of sensitization of local communities to the value of MTBE. The study also highlights the need for greater involvement of many kinds of stakeholder, and in particular, it focuses on how communities can be encouraged to work together with schools. A clearer understanding of what literacy involves, and how subjects can be taught in poorly-resourced communities, can be gained by considering the contribution of funds of local knowledge and modes of expression that build on local cultural resources. However, the strategies proposed are insufficient given the flawed model of primary education that the present MTBE policy embodies. A reenvisioning of how MTBE articulates with English-medium education is also needed. Substantial rethinking is needed to address target 4.6 of SDG 4 (UNDP, Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld (accessed 30 November 2015), 2015) which aims to ensure that “all youth and a substantial proportion of adults achieve literacy and numeracy by 2030”.

For over a decade, the authors have worked collaboratively to better understand and address the challenges and possibilities of promoting multilingual literacy in Uganda, a country of over 44 million people where over 40 African languages are spoken and English is the official language. This article focuses on the diverse ways that teachers promote early literacy in large multilingual classrooms, and how the innovative African Storybook digital initiative might support primary school teachers in both rural and urban areas. We begin the article with a description of our collaborative work on the African Storybook (http://www.africanstorybook.org/) and one of its derivatives, Storybooks Uganda (https://global-asp.github.io/storybooks-uganda/). Then, drawing on a collaborative study of primary school classrooms in eastern Uganda, we analyze four common strategies that Ugandan teachers use to promote multilingual literacy in their classrooms: the use of the mother tongue as a resource; songs and multimodality; translanguaging; and linguistic strategies for classroom management. We follow this with a discussion of a 2015 teacher education workshop in eastern Uganda, which illustrates how the African Storybook can help support Ugandan teachers as they navigate the challenges of large classrooms. We conclude that the African Storybook has much promise for addressing the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper describes an endeavour to build natural language processing (NLP) tools for Runyakitara, a group of four closely related Bantu languages spoken in western Uganda. In contrast with major world languages such as English, for which corpora are comparatively abundant and NLP tools are well developed, computational linguistic resources for Runyakitara are in short supply. First therefore, we need to collect corpora for these languages, before we can proceed to the design of a spell-checker, grammar-checker and applications for computer-assisted language learning (CALL). We explain how we are collecting primary data for a new Runya Corpus of speech and writing, we outline the design of a morphological analyser, and discuss how we can use these new resources to build NLP tools. We are initially working with Runyankore–Rukiga, a closely-related pair of Runyakitara languages, and we frame our project in the context of NLP for low-resource languages, as well as CALL for the preservation of endangered languages. We put our project forward as a test case for the revitalization of endangered languages through education and technology.