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Title: | Into the cauldron: an interplay of indigenous and globalised knowledge with strong and weak notions of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa |
Author: | Heugh, Kathleen |
Year: | 2009 |
Periodical: | Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa |
Volume: | 40 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 166-189 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Ethiopia South Africa |
Subjects: | language instruction multilingualism languages of instruction |
Abstract: | This article draws attention to a long, precolonial as well as contemporary history of successes in mother-tongue literacy and bi/multilingual educational provision in Africa. Two case studies of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa are presented in order to demonstrate, even under resource-poor conditions, that it is possible to provide bilingual and multilingual education in Africa. System-wide studies in Ethiopia show that such opportunities, developed as a response to the domestic needs of an African country, deliver more successful learning outcomes than do second-language, monolingually driven systems. The South African example shows that although there is a multilingual education policy intent, its application is impelled towards expensive monolingual imperatives which draw on contemporary, external-to-Africa debates on education. Such imperatives have not brought the anticipated educational rewards - rather, the reverse. The data from the case studies are sufficiently compelling to show that neo and post-colonial obfuscation in education is outdated. Bibliogr., note, ref. [Journal abstract] |