African Languages Development in Education -Bilingualism and African Languages

Abstract

The issue of teaching in the mother tongue has generated significant and controversial debates among decision-makers and has engendered different policies aiming to enhance the use of mother tongues into educational curricula. Africa is a perfect illustration of a continent where mother tongues have been marginalized over years to let the place to foreign and colonial languages to expand and become official languages.This article reviews the current situation of African languages as means of instruction and provides some anticipation for the use of mother tongues in educational systems designed in future national strategic plans. The study of these plans has been conducted in order to examine whether African countries have been able to achieve the significant resolutions derived from the UNESCO conference in 1953 and whether they apply bilingual approaches properly without ignoring the importance of mother tongues. Results have demonstrated that most African countries have been able to use their own mother tongue as the language of instruction together with a foreign language, and seek to adopt the same strategy in the coming years. Few countries on the other hand plan to change from using the mother tongue into applying one foreign language only.