[lg policy] bibitem: PR É-vue [discourse’s-analysis] TRI-vium - Education and language policy

[Harold Schiffman]

PRÉ-vue [discourse’s-analysis] TRI-vium - Education and language
policy - by Paul Shipale    Related Stories


  While commemorating the Day of the African Child, honouring those
who participated in the Soweto uprising and raising awareness for the
need to improve education provided to African children, when students
were protesting the poor quality of Bantu education and demanding the
right to be taught in their own language as opposed to the teaching of
Afrikaans, I couldn’t help but think about what Neville Alexander, on
behalf of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South
Africa (PRAESA), wrote: “It is axiomatic that democracy and
empowerment are served by people being able to use the languages they
command best. It thus follows that formative research and advocacy (or
awareness raising) rather than specious statistical misinformation are
required in the kind of situation in which we find ourselves on the
African continent.”

I applaud the newly appointed minister of education and his deputy,
Drs Abraham Iyambo and David Namwandi because education, the minister
said, “entails unlocking, stimulating and unleashing the untapped
innate talents”. In a short time, the minister managed to say the
right words, made a clarion call to rally the nation behind the
daunting task of capacity building and human resource development, and
to rejuvenate the system. The question is: Strategic factors such as:
the objectives of the system; the recruitment of staff; academic
policies related to the choice of programmes; admission policies;
quality assurance mechanism, support services, evaluation scheme,
staff development and most importantly language policy, are they
considered? Otherwise we’ll end up confusing access with success.

With the ETSIP programme, which is aimed at improving the quality of
education and the training sector, the primary net enrolment rate
currently stands at 96.4 percent. The secondary enrolment rate is
about 55 percent.

A second review meeting about the implementation of ETSIP was
conducted in 2008 and found that progress in implementing activities
according to the ETSIP strategic priorities has been made. With the
money from the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), books are being
distributed to needy schools and it is true that accommodation for
both teachers and learners is a problem as well as long distances, but
nothing stops the ministry from providing public transport to learners
in the regions and I still conclude that as long as we don’t address
the language policy issue, our problems are far from over. According
to Neville, there is first of all what is call Tollefson’s paradox,
according to which inadequate language competence is not due to poor
texts and materials, learners’ low motivation, inadequate learning
theories and teaching methodologies, or the other explanations that
are commonly proposed.

Instead, language competence remains a barrier to employment,
education, and economic well-being due to political forces of our own
making. For while modern social and economic systems require certain
kinds of language competence, they simultaneously create conditions
which ensure that vast numbers of people will be unable to acquire
that competence. A central mechanism by which this process occurs is
language policy (Tollefson 1991:7). At the end of the ‘sixties already
Pierre Alexandre’s insightful and illuminating analysis of the
relationship between neo-colonial language policy and the reproduction
of social inequality, noticed the way in which knowledge of English or
French was tantamount to the acquisition of what is now referred to as
‘cultural capital’ by the post-colonial elites.

This minority, although socially and ethnically as heterogeneous as
the majority, is separated from the latter by that monopoly which
gives it its class specificity: the use of a means of universal
communication, French or English, whose acquisition represents truly a
form of cultural accumulation. But this is a very special kind of
capital, since it is an instrument of communication and not one of
production. It is nevertheless this instrument, and generally this
instrument alone, which makes possible the organisation of the entire
modern sector of production and distribution of goods (Alexandre
1972:86).

It is an indisputable fact that in the post-colonial situation, the
linguistic hierarchy built into the colonial system led to knowledge
of the conquerors’ language becoming a vital component of the
‘cultural capital’ of the neo-colonial elite. I am a product of those
who were sent to Europe and came back with glutinous words stuck
between our teeth and white washed with nothing left to say to our
brothers but only mimicking our former masters being fluent in
English, Spanish and French. But for the overwhelming majority of the
people, the type of proficiency in the relevant European, or world,
language that would empower them is actually unattainable under
present conditions.

For Neville Alexander language confers symbolic power or cultural
capital, and in the language market privileges and exclusions are
offered according to one’s possession of linguistic capital; those
without it are not only marginalized but also effectively censored.
The Mazruis (Ali and Alamin) contend Africa’s linguistic dependence or
Eurocentricism excludes ordinary people from the affairs of state and
public life, making the pursuit of development and democracy so much
more difficult to realise. The imperial languages were introduced to
Africa as media of command, not of rights, and after they had shed
that role they remained languages of a middle class minority
patronised by the West and well attuned to its liberal or neo-liberal
doctrines.

Neville writes that by way of reminding us of the agonising decisions
which had to be made, let us cite the statements made by leaders of
African independence movements, first by President Milton Obote at the
very beginning of the struggle soon after Uganda was given its
independence by Britain, second by Prime Minister Hage Geingob of
Namibia in the last phase of the anti-colonial struggle. Hage Geingob,
the Director of the United Nations Institute for Namibia at the time,
wrote as follows in 1981: …The aim of introducing English is to
introduce an official language that will steer the people away from
linguo-tribal affiliations and differences and create conditions
conducive to national unity in the realm of language. Inherent in the
adoption of this policy are a number of issues and implications ...
Will English become an elitist language, thereby defeating the goals
for which it was intended?” (UNIN: 1981)

In recent years, scholars such as Robert Phillipson and Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas (1986), James Tollefson (1991), and others, have
established the existence of what has been called the ESL industry and
have criticised the pernicious effects of this industry. A
dissertation by Anjuli Gupta-Basu traces this process in detail for
some of the languages of the Indian subcontinent. Among other things,
she concludes that the popularity, spread and dominance of the English
language has nothing to do with the popular perception of mythical or
inherent linguistic properties of the language.

Instead, she maintains that the dominance of English is due to
conscious, co-ordinate and heavily funded (Anglo-American)
institutional promotion programmes, combined with functional,
financial and professional incentives for the learners (Gupta-Basu
1999:249). According to the project on the Classification of African
Languages on the Basis of Mutual Intelligibility conducted by Prah’s
Center for Advanced Studies of African Society, “over 80 percent of
Africans speak no more than 12 key languages (clusters that enjoy 85
percent mutual intelligibility.... The linguistic landscape of
contemporary Africa is complicated by the fact that many African
speech-forms and dialects have been rendered into writing by rival
missionary groups which have elevated some dialects to the status of
full-blown languages.

“To undo the mess arising out of this situation requires systematic
orthographic engineering which fortunately has commenced.” Instead of
one Oshiwambo, Kavango or Otjiherero language for instance, we have up
to seven dialects in Oshiwambo, three or four in Otjiherero and five
or so in Kavango. Little wonder why we now have silly ‘tribal
disputes’ as if we did not live together for more than a thousand
years before. The Bantu languages (technically Narrow Bantu languages)
constitute a grouping belonging to the Niger-Congo languages. The
Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the world’s major language
families, and Africa’s largest in terms of geographical area, number
of speakers, and number of distinct languages.

By one estimate, there are 513 languages in the Bantu grouping, 681
languages in Bantoid, and 1,514 in Niger-Congo. Bantu languages are
spoken largely east and south of the present day country of Nigeria,
i.e. in the regions commonly known as central Africa, east Africa, and
southern Africa, in one word, the SADC countries which could easily
speak three main languages.  The technical term Bantu, simply meaning
“people”, was first used by Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek
(1827-1875) as this is reflected in many of the languages of this
group. A common characteristic of Bantu languages is that they use
words such as muntu or mutu for “person”, and the plural prefix for
human nouns starting with “mu-” in most languages is ba-, thus giving
Bantu for “people”.

Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof was a German linguist and one of the
first linguists to study African languages. In his early years and
career he pursued extensive studies comparing the grammatical
structures of Bantu languages.  The most widely used system, the
alphanumeric coding system developed by Malcolm Guthrie, professor of
Bantu languages who is known primarily for his classification of Bantu
languages ... in his seminal 1948 classification of the Bantu
languages, is mainly geographic.

The only attempt at a detailed genetic classification to replace the
Guthrie system is the 1999 “Tervuren” proposal of Bastin, Coupez, and
Mann. However, it relies on Lexicostatistics as an approach to
comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of
lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative
method but does not reconstruct a proto-language.  According to the
classification of Malcolm Guthrie (1971: 60-61) Oshiwambo for instance
belongs to the group R21. Along with Otjiherero and Rukwangali and
other languages such as Ovimbundu, they belong to the languages which
from the early times have been written by using a disjunctive writing
system.

They are tone languages, but tone is not normally marked in writing.
Several Bantu languages have adopted a disjoining writing system,
which forms a special challenge for automatic analysis of written
text. In those systems, part of bound morphemes is treated as
independent words, while other languages treat equivalent morphemes as
affixes of a head morpheme. The concept of word is blurred in
disjoining writing systems, because there is no systematic rule system
for writing conventions. Not only are bound morphemes written as
separate words, also independent words are sometimes written together
as one string, which also explains why most of our learners perform
badly in foreign languages in terms of writing and oral, using
consonants and vowels where they are not supposed to, like ‘sh’ for s
and mb for b preceded by a vowel, e.g. shit for sit and octomber for
October.

The real challenge before the African leaders therefore is whether
they have the political will to adopt language policies that seek to
integrate our many languages into one. We need a language policy that
does not only cater for the elite but also the majority that can not
speak those foreign languages to address the problem in education,
science and technology, ICT and human resource development.

http://www.newera.com.na/article.php?articleid=11538


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