English and French bilingual education and language policy in Cameroon: the bottom-up approach or the policy of no policy?

Abstract

Cameroon, host to around 280 local languages, two European official languages (English and French) and Pidgin English, has been struggling since the 1960s to achieve official bilingualism for national unity and integration. This policy implies that each citizen should learn and use both official languages. The greatest means to implement this language policy has been formal education. However, the failure or mitigated results of the State’s initiatives to produce competent bilingual citizens led to a resurrection and fast dissemination of a defunct education programme launched by the State in 1963 and which consisted of a dual-medium (English and French) and dual-curriculum (British and French curricula) programme offered to a handful of selected Cameroonians. The many obstacles to this atypical and complex programme led the State to stopping the experiment. In 1989, an equivalent programme was launched in two private primary schools and, nowadays, dozens of such schools do the same nationwide without any official recognition. This study examines the State’s tolerance of this very demanding but rapidly spreading programme operating outside the country’s primary education curricula and pedagogical requirements, among other issues, but which seems so attractive to parents. This attractiveness comes from the fact that this dual-medium and dual-curriculum programme enables pupils to become competent bilinguals in English and French. However, because the programme entails extra burdens for parents and pupils, one of the findings this study arrives at is that the same degree of bilingualism could be obtained through a version of the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach.