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…

In sub-Saharan Africa, education conducted through a European language is associated with low school achievement. Both teachers and learners may often not be fluent enough to use the language as a medium of instruction. In these circumstances, both also make use of a common African language. They switch between two languages in the plenary…

The central concern of this volume is how to provide quality education to African children, adolescents and adults through the best-suited media and curricular content in order to achieve social cohesion, inclusion and sustainable development. For at least five decades, since the 1953 UNESCO Report "The Use of Vernacular Languages in…

Africa's educational systems are undergoing a quiet revolution. As these systems move away from working exclusively in the old colonial languages, usually English or French, bilingual schools which use local indigenous languages are springing up in many regions of Africa. This paper points out the historical processes driving the bilingual…

This paper discusses an attempt to establish community literacy procedures in an Eastern Cape community school. The school hosts the Additive Bilingual Education (ABLE) project, a cooperation between UK and South African universities and the school trust. The community literacy strand of the project encourages family members to contribute oral…

The theme of this book cuts across disciplines. Contributors to this volume are specialized in education and especially classroom research as well as in linguistics, most being transdisciplinary themselves. Around 65 sub-Saharan languages figure in this volume as research objects: as means of instruction, in connection with teacher training,…

Analyses of how African communities use language show that indigenous languages coexist with metropolitan languages in complex configurations of speech practices. Argues that these practices should suggest a rethinking of the purpose, function, and methodology of teaching languages in developing African contexts, building on the ways that local…

This bibliography lists publications concerned with bilingual education and immersion programs and how they are used in and outside of Canada. In the beginning, an overview is provided of publications from related disciplines that have brought crucial recognition to the fields of bilingual and immersion education. These include: second and foreign…

A discussion of bilingualism, biliteracy, and the educational context of Sub-Saharan Africa has three areas of focus. The first is the argument that the school environment is a complex one for bilingual education, biliteracy, and socialization generally in this multiethnic area, and that ideology and literacy issues feed language politics at…

The place of the English language in contemporary Africa is changing. English has spread rapidly, but, at the same time, the indigenous languages have remained and have grown in strength because of an increase in population and an awakening of national consciousness. A developing country must have a national language, whether English or native, to…