In multilingual sub-Saharan African countries, many children attend school and learn to read in a language that they do not speak at home. This mismatch between home and school language may contribute to poor learning outcomes, including low literacy rates. Bilingual education that includes a local language of instruction has become more prevalent…

Even a quick glance at international data reveals something troubling: There is an increasing economic and educational gap between Africa and the rest of the world. If we look just a bit deeper, we find that economic and educational stagnation may simply be the inevitable outcomes of broad educational failure for millions of rural African…

This study describes the use of literacy--including the written word--in the maintenance and practice of Lukumí, a Diasporic African spiritual tradition. While Lukumí is decidedly orally transmitted, the written word is still a critical part of its contemporary practice. Relying on data collected during participant observation of ceremonies and…

"Koladeras" are women who use call and response in impromptu songs that may contain proverbs, stories about the community, their life experiences, and who and what they see in their world from their own perspective. Via qualitative methods of (auto)ethnography, personal and life story narratives, and interviews, I look at how…

The purpose of this study was to explore the connections between young children's oral language vocabulary and children's reading of written language in beginning reading books. Oral language has been viewed as the foundation for emergent reading development as it provides the semantic base, syntactic base and phonological base for successfully…

Two-thirds of the world's conflicts are in Africa. In particular, the Great Lakes region (Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Tanzania) continues to see conflicts that are complex, extreme and seemingly intractable. By exploring the narrative experiences of those most affected by the conflicts in the region--specifically…

Interaction between oral and literate modes of communication in a predominantly oral culture is discussed in the Islamic context of West Africa. Communication is viewed as transmission of knowledge in a formal learning situation (a one way process) and as an informal shared process between literate and nonliterate community members. (BRR)

Explores the role of language and the related linguistic skills (oracy) in traditional, indigenous African education, addressing the role and nature of proverbs, riddles, word games, arithmetic puzzles, dilemma tales, and fables, myths, and legends as well as the use of praise songs and praise poems in traditional African communities. (Author/SM)

This review covers the status of languages and literacy in the countries of southern Africa, policies of literacy promotion, and the emerging symbioses among spoken languages and among literacies in mother tongues, national or official languages, and metropolitan languages. Five statistical tables are included. (66 references) (LB)

Previous accounts of "europhone" status (anglophone, francophone, etc.) have inadequately addressed spoken-written differences as well as different post-colonial developments taken by Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and East Africa vis-a-vis those of West, Central, and Southern Africa. This article investigates the extent to…