The Language Question in the Teaching and Examination of ‘A’ Level Shona: A Case of Masvingo District in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This paper investigates the perceptions of Zimbabwean teachers, examiners and pupils towards the shift from English to Shona in the teaching and examination of Advanced level (‘A’ level) Shona Paper 2 in a context where English, a foreign language, has always mediated the teaching and examining of this paper. The paper also attempts to discover the attendant impact that this linguistic shift has had on candidates’ performance in the examinations. Research findings indicate that although the official policy advocates using Shona language to teach Shona, practice in some schools indicates a laissez-faire implementation of the policy where individual teachers continued to rely on English or, in some cases, code-switched from Shona to English during classroom interactions. Most teachers castigated the existing situation where there were more Shona Grammar textbooks written in English compared to Shona, a situation that demanded translation competence from teachers whose own college and university training had been done in English. However, the introduction of Shona in the teaching of ‘A’ level Shona Paper 2 has been widely welcomed as a development which has helped Zimbabwe retain her linguistic autonomy. The majority of respondents argued that it is intellectually cramping for learners to be expected to ‘learn’ their own language in a ‘borrowed’ language as this negates their performance in the national examinations. The paradox of this research, however, is that although the introduction of Shona has engendered a marked quantitative increase in the number of candidates passing ZIMSEC examinations, the quality of examination passes has been affected.