Challenges Affecting Teaching and Learning of Languages at IPRC Kigali

Abstract

Rwandan education has been trying to find the correct way of teaching and learning foreign languages at school for a long time. In the academic year 2020/2021, many official languages, mainly French, Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili, have been introduced to be taught as subjects in first years in IPRC Kigali, in addition to English. During the implementation of the new instructions, challenges have been noticed. For that reason, in this study, the researcher has tried to find out challenges of the above mentioned changes. Qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis were used. To gather information, two questionnaires were designed and addressed to teachers and concerned learners respectively year 1 students. Respondents involved in this research were 11 language teachers and 100 learners. The findings revealed that teaching and learning multiple languages simultaneously has many challenges. Some of them are: making students overloaded with lessons in a short time and students don’t get them well; issues of code switching and code mixing; students remain unproficient. And one of the recommendations is that students should be taught those languages from the lower levels of their studies so as to have a strong background at higher learning schools.