*Featured image: a Rwandan classroom (obtained from Ikea Foundation photo library)
As an international student who pursued a graduate degree at an American university, I have had a very personal, first-handed experience with an educational environment where the language of instruction differed from my mother tongue language. Quite frankly, absorbing new information through a foreign language was an incredibly difficult task.
Language can be many things—in today’s global economy, language (especially English and in case of non-English speaking settings, other widely used foreign languages such as Spanish or Chinese) is seen as a useful transferrable skill to have in the job market. From a less economics-oriented perspective, language is a cultural and societal construct that largely determines an individual’s identity. Consider how in the Korean language, there is a different form of speech that’s used when addressing those who are older than the speaker, while there is no such a thing in the English language—this is likely based on the different cultural norms. The dominance of active voice, the lack of phrasing to distinguish between tenses, and the existence of gender determinants for different words are other examples of diversity in different lingual systems. These differences impact individual actions, even economic ones: for instance, a study found that people using “futureless” languages (that use the same expression for events that occurred at different time points) are 30% more likely than those using “futured” languages to save money, because they see the future as being more imminent (For further detail, see this article from Ted ideas). In schools, familiarity with the academic language is one of the fundamental baseline differences between students from marginalized and more advantageous backgrounds.
The language of instruction has very important implications for economic development, as it heavily impacts a students’ agency. At the macro level, it can be a tool to promote social cohesion (e.g. Rwanda intentionally adopted English as the language of instruction for this purpose); in other cases it exacerbated social tension and inequity—colonial education systems have used language of instruction as the means of reinforcing their ruling and to privilege certain populations. For instance, all schools for Koreans used the Japanese language for instruction and the vast majority of teaching forces were Japanese when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule (Sorensen, 1994). This language policy, along with tracking schemes, disadvantaged ethnic Koreans and prohibited their upward mobility within the education system. Yet post-independence in 1945, the language of education was rather smoothly changed back into Korean. The fact that Korean was a single shared language in the nation, as well as the fact that it was scripted language, facilitated the repercussions from the colonial education system.
However, consensus on the language of instruction did not come as naturally in the case of many African countries due to the high level of lingual diversity. In Rwanda, for instance, French and English have been preferred as the official language over the traditionally ‘Rwandan’ language, Kinyarwanda (Samuelson and Freedman, 2010). English is the language of the Tutsi elites who presently have political and social power, while French is the language of Hutu elites who were socially privileged during Belgium occupancy and until the end of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. (full timeline available here). Kinyarwanda is used as a medium for instruction at primary level only, and from secondary school students are trained in a second language. Up until 2008, Rwandan students pursuing tertiary education were expected to master both French and English—currently, English is the sole language of instruction in the post-primary Rwandan education system. The percentage of both the English and French speakers in the whole of Rwanda is estimated to be less than 5% (ibid).
The use of English as the official academic language in Rwanda is legitimized on the basis that it will ‘eradicate genocide ideology’ (ibid, p.198). Students, parents, and teachers, as well as the general public, see education in English as an invaluable asset for the next generation—for example, being bilingual in English will increase a Rwandan student’s mobility within Anglophone Africa. The costs are, however, not negligible. Teachers in Rwanda are ill-equipped, as most of them lack the capacity to teach in English—as a result, the overall quality of education is likely to be at risk. Furthermore, the different level of cultural capital is likely to have a greater impact on widening achievement gap when the medium of instruction is a second language. Although less emphasized than other issues, there are also concerns about an identity crisis, loss of lingual tradition and collective identity.
In the case of Rwanda, potential strategies to encourage the educational success of all pupils could include (i) providing additional public support to students who have lower proficiency in English (e.g. remedial tutoring), and (ii) investing heavily in teacher training to ensure high-quality instruction in English. Expanding instruction in Kinyarwanda to secondary level could potentially help as well, or at least allowing the language to play a supplemental role to facilitate teaching and learning. While considering the needs of the students and parents seem to make the problem of language of instruction in Rwanda simpler than it actually is, it is difficult to assume what would be the best policy when there are complex economic and cultural complexity involved.
References:
Harber, C. (2014) Education and International Development: Theory, Practice and Issues. Symposium Books.
PBS Frontline: Rwanda—Historical Chronology, obtained from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/etc/cron.html
Samuelson, B. and Freedman, S. (2010). Language Policy, Multilingual Education, and Power in Rwanda. Language Policy, 9, pp.191-215.
Sorensen, C. (1994) Success and Education in South Korea. Comparative Education Review, 38 (1), pp.11-35.
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