Mozambique: Conference On Bilingual Education

[Harold F. Schiffman]

From: AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Conference On Bilingual Education

Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
March 7, 2006
Maputo

Mozambican Education Minister Aires Aly on Tuesday called for "an overall
platform to encourage the struggle for the right of children to be taught
in their mother tongues". He was speaking in Maputo at the opening session
of an international conference on bilingual education, organised by a
Danish NGO, Ibis, in partnership with the Movement for Education for All
(MEPT), and the government's National Institute for the Development of
Education (INDE). Under colonial rule education in state schools was
provided exclusively in the Portuguese language - and this continued in
independent Mozambique.  Right up until 2003 - 28 years after independence
- the medium of education in primary schools was Portuguese, a language
utterly foreign to most Mozambican children, particularly in the
countryside. Thus, although independence led to a dramatic increase in the
number of children attending school, the language policy was partly
responsible for high drop-out and failure rates.

Under far-reaching curriculum reforms, bilingual education (in the mother
tongue and in Portuguese) was introduced in 2003, albeit in a very small
number of schools. It is gradually being extended to cover an increasing
number of the many Bantu languages spoken in Mozambique. Aly hoped that
the conference would form part of a profound debate on bilingual education
in Mozambique, and on "the right to a relevant education, to the promotion
of self-esteem, identity and cultural awareness". He recalled that
"colonial oppression violently blocked the development of our languages.
As a result they were relegated to a secondary role as vehicles for the
transmission of knowledge and culture. Colonial rule tried to wipe out our
cultural identity, denying us the fundamental right to education in our
mother tongues".

Aly said that "historical, political and even pragmatic reasons" meant
that, when independence was proclaimed, Portuguese was adopted as the
official language and as the medium of education. But it soon became clear
that mother tongues must be included in the education system. First,
however, it was necessary to standardise Mozambican languages, many of
which had no generally accepted written form. Hence seminars were held on
standardising the spelling of these languages. Some experimentation with
bilingual education was undertaken in the 1990s, and the results were
encouraging enough for the Education Ministry to include full-scale
bilingual education as one of the major innovations in the new curriculum.
Data from the 1997 population census showed how urgent it was to introduce
mother tongue schooling in primary education.

For the usual description of Mozambique as "Lusophone" is grossly
misleading. The census found that only 6.5 per cent of the population
considers Portuguese as their mother tongue, and only 8.8 per cent use
Portuguese regularly at home. Only 39.6 per cent of the population claimed
a knowledge of Portuguese, and this figure fell to 25.4 per cent in the
countryside, and to 15.6 per cent among rural women. Despite the
Ministry's commitment to bilingual education, the programme has taken off
very slowly. According to the MEPT, to date, out of some 8,000 primary
schools in the country, only 29 are using the bilingual programmes. In the
rest, the children are still being taught in Portuguese.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200603070411.html


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