‘This is No French School’: Language and Education Traditions in Primary Schooling in Cameroon — A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This study draws on the concepts of instrumental and expressive orders to analyse school practice in two Anglophone and two Francophone primary schools in Cameroon, and how micro processes of language socialisation in the schools studied instantiated Anglophone and Francophone education traditions and related to macro processes of systems of education. Using a multimodal method of data collection, including participant observation, focus group and individual interviews, the study adopts a vertical case study approach which corresponds to Bernstein's down-top data collection and analysis approach of research in schools, and draws its comparative stance from the contextualisation of studied cases as a microcosm of global education practice. The study considers the pupils, their classroom, their school, the language that they are socialised into, and the culture that it mediates as units of analysis, and participant observation as a research method into the social life of pupils and their school that seeks to gain an insight into the intricacy of studied phenomenon from the comparative perspective of the dialectic of the local and the global.