The Language of Instruction Issue: Framing an Empirical Perspective

Walter, Stephen L.

doi:10.1002/9780470694138.ch10

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The use of native languages is also crucial for teachers, as we are currently researching and documenting in our ongoing NSF-funded project for STEM education in Kreyòl (http://haiti.mit.edu; https://www.facebook.com/mithaiti; http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1248066). Furthermore, researchers have convincingly argued that, by and large, countries that do not use their populations' mother tongues as languages of instruction are those with the worst records of academic achievement and national development (Hebblethwaite 2012;Walter 2008). Yet, in regard to the communities that most need access to quality education and quality materials in their native languages, policymakers have long neglected such momentous findings.…”

Section: Background: Language Education and Exclusion In Haitimentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn

DeGraff

2016

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This article aims at a deeper understanding of the importance of native languages in education and development, with Haiti as a case study. About half of Haiti's population is illiterate. Among ten children who enter the first grade, at most one (10%) will graduate from high school; a large proportion will drop out of school at an early age. Language is a factor in such academic failure. Education in Haiti is carried out mostly in French, which is spoken fluently by at most 5% of the population, while the language spoken by 100% of the population, namely Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), is by and large excluded from the school system, in spite of legislation, official curricula, and various efforts from civil society to generalize the classroom use of Kreyòl. We hypothesize, based on comparative research on education in the mother tongue, that the systematic classroom use of Kreyòl-at all levels, but especially in early grades-promotes academic success in Haiti, as illustrated in this paper. This article reports on the results of an intervention to improve early-grade reading and writing in Haiti. This intervention is part of a larger project titled "Mother-Tongue Books: Learning to Read in Haiti" (MTB) with Christine 2 of 56 W. Low as principal investigator. The project promotes the collaborative production of books by Haitian school children in their native Kreyòl and the use of these books to enhance literacy gains in early grades. An assessment carried out during academic year 2012-2013 (DeGraff 2013b), using the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) instrument, showed that the first and second graders at Lekòl Kominotè Matènwa (LKM) in La Gonâve, Haiti, performed at a much higher level than their counterparts in five schools nearby. LKM is a pioneering MTB school where Haitian Kreyòl is used as the primary language of instruction. These initial results (referred to below as the "baseline assessment") spearheaded our intervention, whereby the MTB approach was introduced to the five other schools in the study. The final EGRA evaluation data show that the students in the five non-LKM schools, through the MTB intervention, substantially reduced the gap in their reading-and-writing levels vis-à-vis their LKM counterparts. In other words, the literacy skills of the students at the five non-LKM schools rose nearly to the level of those at LKM through the use of an intervention based on child-centered active-learning pedagogy with the systematic use of their native Kreyòl. In this paper, we analyze the data collected in the course of this project and their implications for policies to enhance reading and writing instruction in Haiti.

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Section: Background: Language Education and Exclusion In Haitimentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn

DeGraff

2016

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“…The switch to English as LoLT in Grade 4 is described in the literature as an 'early exit' model of bilingual education (Walter 2008). Various models of bilingual education exist; however, drawing on the literature around bilingual education, we have created Figure 1 to show the five most common models of bilingual education.…”

Section: Becoming Proficient In the Language Of The Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

A mathematics teacher’s response to a dilemma: ‘I’m supposed to teach them in English but they don’t understand’

Robertson¹,

Graven²

2020

South African Journal of Childhood Education

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“…In this case, the school, typical of previously white suburban schools, use English as the language of instruction from reception year (Grade R) throughout and children follow the English as a home language curriculum (as do all children in schools where English is the language of instruction from Grade 1, regardless of their linguistic repertoires), while taking isiXhosa as a subject (First Additional Language, FAL) for a few hours during the week. For many children then, this school is experienced as a 'straight for English' or submersion (Walter 2008) context, that is children are submerged in English and expected to sink or swim. 11 Extract 2 is from observation of news time in the classroom where the teacher, Mrs West, is calling on children to speak and at the same time commenting in asides/ off-stage to the researcher: .…”

Section: Case Study 2 -Participation As Assimilationmentioning

confidence: 99%

What counts as language in South African schooling?

McKinney

2015

AILA

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This paper focuses on the lack of impact on language education of recent paradigm shifts in the study of language and society such as the recognition of the ideology of language[s] as stable, discrete or bounded entities and the reality of heteroglossic languaging and semiotic practices in everyday life. Using South Africa as a case, the paper explores the implications of heteroglossic conceptualising of language as social practice for language education through three ethnographically informed case studies of classroom discourse. I will argue that monoglossic orientations which ironically underpin both monolingual and “multilingual” approaches have wide-ranging constraining effects on how children are positioned in schooling, and on children’s participation in classrooms, resulting in a form of ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007).

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The Language of Instruction Issue: Framing an Empirical Perspective

Cited by 9 publications

References 1 publication

Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn

Mother-tongue books in Haiti: The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and in reading to learn

A mathematics teacher’s response to a dilemma: ‘I’m supposed to teach them in English but they don’t understand’

What counts as language in South African schooling?

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