Birgit Brock-Utne

English as the language of instruction or destruction – how do teachers and students in Tanzania cope?

Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 2004 Paper No. 598

Universität Duisburg-Essen

Birgit Brock-Utne

University of Oslo (Norway)

English as the language of instruction or destruction – how do teachers and students in Tanzania cope?

Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 2004 Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical Fachbereich 3 Paper No. 598 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen

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Birgit Brock-Utne

English as the language of instruction or destruction - how do teachers and students in Tanzania cope?

There appears to be general agreement that students learn better when they understand what the teacher is saying (Klaus, 2001:1)

The above quotation from the opening statement of a paper written by David Klaus (2001) of the World Bank ought to be self-evident. Yet the situation in most classrooms in Africa is that students do not understand what the teacher is saying. Especially not if the teacher follows the official policy s/he is supposed to follow, namely to teach through a foreign language only, a language children do not use outside of school, have little exposure to and are not familiar with. In Tanzania the official policy is that Kiswahili – a language spoken by 95% of the population though for many it is a second language – is the language of instruction in primary school.

In Tanzania English is a foreign language – a language children are not exposed much to outside of school – yet it is the language of instruction in secondary and tertiary education. I agree with Holmarsdottir (2003) who has found the distinction made by Ringbom (1987) between a second language and a foreign language useful. Ringbom suggests that in the situation of second language acquisition the language is spoken in the immediate environment [emphasis added] of the language learner and in this environment the learner has positive opportunities to use the language in natural communicative situations and that it may or may not be supplemented by classroom teaching. On the other hand, in the foreign language-learning context the language is not spoken in the learner’s immediate environment and although the mass media may provide opportunities for practicing receptive skills of the language there is little or no opportunity for the learner to use the language in a natural communicative situation. Based on this distinction Holmarsdottir has made the following model:

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Foreign Language Learning vs. Second Language Learning

Foreign Language Learning Second Language Learning

TIME Limited time generally confined to school only.

Unlimited time for both conscious and unconscious learning.

INPUT Limited quantity of highly selected and structured input.

Rich and varied input, but generally unstructured.

TEACHER`S ROLE

Teacher plays a major role with little or no peer learning.

Peers play a major role. If formal learning is also involved it is of secondary importance.

SKILLS Emphasis on written skills and test taking ability. Oral skills are less important as there is little or no opportunity to practice.

Oral skills are essential and natural speech comprehension is significant.

Using the table above for our reflection we see that it fits the situation of Tanzania well. For those Tanzanians for whom Kiswahili is not the first language1, it is a second language, a

1 In 1997 the Tanzanian researcher Grace Puja (2001) interviewed 34 second year female students as well as 22 university teachers in connection with her Ph. D. research. She had written her interview guide in English since she was taking her Ph. D. in Canada and had expected to conduct the research in English. Her interview subjects had, after all, had English as the language of instruction for eight years. She found that most of the Tanzanian female undergraduates that she interviewed asked if they could have the interview in Kiswahili. She then let them choose the language they would like to be interviewed in and only 8 of the 34 subjects chose to be interviewed in English, the rest preferred Kiswahili. Among the eight who chose English were several of Asian descent. Most of the university teachers Puja interviewed stated that most of their students are not competent in either spoken or written English. This is an observation she made during her field work:

During class observations and during my visits at the three University campuses, I noted that most students (male and female) do not speak in class [where the medium of instruction is English] but as soon as the class is over, both teachers and students switch to Kiswahili and communicate freely. (Puja, 2002:1)

The number of children having Kiswahili as the first language is growing rapidly in Tanzania. Although only two of the 73 (3%) University students in the Puja (2001) study identified themselves as Swahili, over 63% of the participants stated that they speak Kiswahili most of the time in their homes. Moreover, only 12% of the participants stated that they speak Kichagga at home although 26 % of the participants indicated that they had Chagga backgrounds. Only 2 of the 73 participants who responded to the questionnaire stated that they speak English most of the time in their homes.

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language they hear around them and use when interacting in the larger society. It is the language of the lower courts, of the various ministries, the language used in the post offices and the banks. Many children in Tanzania who may speak a vernacular language at home speak Kiswahili with their peers. English is to most Tanzanians a truly foreign language that they do not feel comfortable communicating in even after having had it for nine years as language of instruction (see a discussion of study by Puja (2003) later in this article).

This policy has at least five serious consequences:

• It forces teachers who are concerned that learners should grasp difficult concepts to be disobedient to a policy saying no code-switching, no code-mixing, no translations in the class-room

• It forces learners into a situation of rote learning, memorization, parroting and cheating at exams

• It prevents the use of learner- centred and interactive teaching methods and it thereby becomes a barrier to critical thinking and understanding of academic subject matter

• It prevents the learning of correct English • It halts the development of the Kiswahili language

It is to these consequences and the coping strategies of teachers and learners I shall now turn. The examples used are from Tanzania, some are built on my own experiences and field studies, others stem from other researchers on the language of instruction in Tanzania or from the LOITASA project, an ongoing research project. Similar practices used in South African classrooms have been described elsewhere (Brock-Utne and Holmarsdottir, 2003; Brock-Utne, 2003a; Holmarsdottir, 2003). The same practice of code-mixing and code-switching has also been observed in class-rooms in Uganda, Swaziland, Namibia and Burundi (see e.g. Ndayipfukamiye, 1993).

Good teachers – stamped as disobedient The language of instruction policy forces Tanzanian teachers who are concerned that learners should grasp difficult concepts to be disobedient to a policy saying no code-switching and no code-mixing in the class-room. A Tanzanian colleague said to me: “Those who are faithful to the policy of using English only as the language of instruction in secondary school are just concerned with teaching, not with learning. Teaching may be going on in such a case, but not learning.” There may be reason to say that English works as the language of destruction, destructing the learning possibilities and learning outcomes for the learners. Most Tanzanian teachers teaching in secondary schools use strategies we term code-mixing, code-switching or regular translations. When the word code is used here it simply means different languages.

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In a research project sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council Halla

Holmarsdottir and I have decided to use the following definitions of code-switching and code-mixing:

Code-switching refers to a switch in language that takes place between sentences, also called an intersentential change, code-mixing refers to a switch in language that takes place within the same sentence also called an intrasentential change. (Brock-Utne and Holmarsdottir, 2003)

Code-mixing is generally looked at more negatively than code-switching. Code-mixing often indicates a lack of language competence in either language concerned. Code-switching does not necessarily indicate a deficiency on the part of the speaker, but may result from complex bilingual skills (Myers-Scotton, 1993).

Code-switching is a strategy a teacher even with good command of English (if that is the language of instruction) may use when s/he sees that his/her students do not understand. It is a strategy often used by teachers who are knowledgeable in the first language of students. From observations I have made so far and by analyzing observations made by other researchers it seems to me that the strategy code-mixing is mostly being used by teachers who are not language teachers and do not have a good command of the language of instruction.

Examples of code-mixing

In the example below the geography teacher mixes in English words in his sentences but lets the important words be said in Kiswahili. The following excerpt is taken from class-room observations made in a Form I geography lesson: T: These are used for grinding materials. It looks like what? S: Kinu (mortar)2

T: Kinu and what? S: Mtwangio (pestle) T: It looks like kinu and mtwangio and it works like kinu and mtwangio.

(Rubagumya; Jones; Mwansoko, 1999:18)

2 In the original kinu is translated pestle and mortar kinu. This is, however, incorrect. Kinu is mortar and mtwangio is pestle. My correction here of the original text has been double-checked by consulting Prof. F. Senkoro, the Head of the Kiswahili Department at the University of Dar es Salaam.

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In this example the teacher is satisfied with the answer from the student which shows that the student has the right concepts. The fact that these concepts are expressed in Kiswahili does not seem to bother the subject matter teacher, who does nothing to expand the vocabulary of the student within the English language. From the excerpt we do not even know whether the teacher knows the correct terms in English. Even if s/he does, s/he does not bother to make his/her students partake of this knowledge. Had the teacher insisted on an answer in English, s/he would most likely have been met by silence. We see that it is the more complicated, specialized terms that are expressed in Kiswahili, not the everyday ones. An argument sometimes heard that teachers code-mix because the more advanced terms are not developed in the language of the learners does not seem to hold true for Kiswahili. The technical terms are there and well understood by the learners. Had the teacher in this case known the concepts in English, and been concerned about expanding the vocabulary of the learners within the English language, s/he would have used some time to explain what these terms are in English. This would, however, have slowed down the speed of the geography learning. The teacher would then be engaged in English teaching, not in geography teaching.

Observations that Osaki made in science teaching in secondary schools in Tanzania have made him reach the following conclusion:

Students either talk very little in class and copy textual information from the chalkboard, or attempt discussion in a mixed language (i.e. English and Kiswahili) and then copy notes on the chalkboard in English…teachers who insist on using English only end up talking to themselves with very little student input. (Osaki, 1991)

As all educators know, student input is essential for learning. In an experiment one of the doctoral students on the LOITASA project Halima Mwinsheikhe (2001, 2002) conducted, as part of the research on my project and in the connection with her Master thesis, she had teachers teach some biology lessons solely through the medium of English, and later had the same teachers teach some other biology lessons solely through the medium of Kiswahili. She tells that during the experimental lessons one could easily see that teachers who taught by using English only were exerting a great effort not to succumb to the temptation of code mixing or switching. They seemed to be very tense and their verbal expressions were rather “dry”. Those who taught in Kiswahili were much more relaxed and confident. Those who taught through the medium of Kiswahili also seemed to enjoy teaching. They found it easy to make the lessons lively by introducing some jokes.

It is not only when teachers are to teach students that the language of communication becomes a problem. Halima Mwinsheikhe (2003) tells that after her study for the master degree and her return to Tanzania she felt compelled to probe further into the issue of Kiswahili/English as LOI for science in secondary schools. Whenever she found herself among teachers and/or students she observed and sought information/opinions regarding

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this issue. She tells how in May 2002 she co-facilitated a training workshop for science teachers of the SESS (Science Education in Secondary Schools) project together with an American Peace Corp. The main objective was to train the teachers on the use of participatory methods to teach/learn some topics on Reproductive Health. She relates:

The intention was to conduct the workshop in English. However, it became evident that the low level of participation, and the dull workshop atmosphere prevailing was partly due to teachers’ problem with the English language. This is not a very shocking observation considering that some of these teachers were students some four years ago. The workshop co-ordinator and I agreed to use both Kiswahili and English. The problem was immediately solved. Since we started with this mixture, the working atmosphere was good, lively and conducive to learning. The other workshop co-ordinator was well aware of the language problem in secondary classrooms in Tanzania. … An interesting observation is that my co-facilitator, an American, who had been in Tanzania for only 18 months, used Kiswahili rather well in teaching a science subject intended for secondary schools! (Mwinsheikhe, 2003:145)

Halima Mwinsheikhe sees the observations made during this particular workshop as a cause for concern because in the final analysis the language problem of the teachers involved will impact on students during teaching/learning experiences. The implication is that teachers will most likely opt to use Kiswahili to surmount the existing language barrier. And yet at the end of the day students will be required to write their test/examinations in English.

Examples of code-switching

Teachers in Tanzanian class-rooms know that they are not allowed to code-mix or code-switch, yet most of them still do. Halima Mwinsheikhe, who has worked as a biology teacher in Tanzanian secondary schools for many years, admits:

I personally was compelled to switch to Kiswahili by a sense of helplessness born of the inability to make students understand the subject matter by using English. (Mwinsheikhe, 2001:16)

In the following passage the science teacher changes languages completely as he sees that his students do not understand (taken from Rubagumya; Jones; Mwansoko, 1999: 17) His own English is not easy to understand. He expresses himself much clearer and better in Kiswahili. For him the important thing is to get the subject matter across. He is a teacher of science, not of English. T: When you go home put some water in a jar, leave it direct on sun rays and observe the

decrease of the amount of water, have you understood? Ss: (silence) T: Nasema, chukua chombo, uweke maji na kiache kwenye jua, maji yatakuaje? (I say take a

container with water and leave it out in the sun, what will happen to the water?) Ss: Yatapungua (it will decrease) T: Kwa nini? (Why?) Ss: Yatafyonzwa na mionzi ya jua (it will evaporate by the sun’s rays)

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In the example above the teacher, after his initial try in English and the following

silence from the students, switches completely to Kiswahili.

Translations Another coping strategy that teachers use in their classrooms, in both countries, is more or less full translations of everything they say in English to Kiswahili in Tanzania and to isiXhosa in the South African research case. I have observed this strategy several times during the years I supervised student teachers as part of my job at the University of Dar es Salaam (1987-1992) and in November 2001 I had the opportunity to do so again. An excerpt from my field notes describes such an event:

The next class we observed was a Form II class that had commerce with a male teacher. He made use of Kiswahili to make students understand. He would say the sentences in English very slowly first and then repeat what he had said more quickly but in Kiswahili this time. On one occasion one of the students then asked him a question in Kiswahili and he answered in Kiswahili and at some length. On the blackboard he wrote “dailly sales” four different places and always with two lls. He seemed like a very good teacher, the students were eager and he was very quick to praise them (“excellent girl”, “excellent boy”).

The fact that everything is repeated naturally slows down the lesson. It functions like when we are using an interpreter who will translate everything somebody says in a language we do not understand into a familiar language. As we know, such talks take about double the amount of time compared to a talk just in one language (or simultaneous translation). We also do not pay much attention to the first language spoken because we know that we shall get that information repeated in a language we understand better. This situation was very apparent in the research conducted by Holmarsdottir in the South African part of the project. (Brock-Utne and Holmarsdottir, 2003) During a reading comprehension task given to the students, one of the teachers involved translated the entire passage for the students line by line!

So far we have been dealing with classroom situations where the teacher is trying to bring some factual knowledge across to his/her students. But in a school setting language is used not only to impart knowledge but it is also used for class-room management. Language is further used to create a good atmosphere between students and teachers.

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Classroom management Sitting for several years in the back of many secondary school class-rooms in Tanzania to observe my own students teach, I often noticed that even though they tried to use English throughout the lesson, they would, probably even without noticing, switch into Kiswahili when they felt the need to discipline a student, have him be quiet, stand up or fetch something or give a next-day assignment.

In his doctoral thesis Casmir Rubagumya (1993) shows how Kiswahili is frequently being used in class-rooms in secondary schools in Tanzania for classroom management:

Teacher: Yes...good trial in English…-they took out raw materials...what else? Yes…Rehema unasinzia? (Rehema are you falling asleep?) (Rubagumya, 1993:193)

Here the part which constitutes the academic lesson is said in English while the remark meant to discipline and have the student pay attention is given in a more familiar language.

Creating a good classroom atmosphere My daughter, who in 1987/88 attended courses in development studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, regretted that her knowledge of Kiswahili was not better. She observed that even though the professors would lecture in English, when they would crack a joke, they did that in Kiswahili and the whole audience laughed.

Halima Mwinsheike who was well familiar with the practice of code-switching in secondary class-rooms in Tanzania from her own time as a secondary school-teacher, interviewed teachers about this practice as part of her research. Here are some responses:

I sometimes use Kiswahili to make students smile or laugh once in a while, which is good for learning. (School SSS teacher)

If I insist to use English throughout it is like teaching dead stones and not students (School CS2 teacher). (Mwinsheike (2002:67)

In 1992 the subject elimu ya siasa (social science) which from 1970 had been taught in Kiswahili in secondary school in Tanzania through a government circular was changed into civics and from then on was taught in English. Realizing that one of my students from Tanzania, Mary Mkwizu, herself had been a siasa teacher who was compelled to change the language of instruction in her teaching, I encouraged her to write about her own experiences and to interview earlier siasa teachers who, like her, had been compelled to change the language of instruction. In interviews that Mkwizu (2002) conducted as part of her master thesis with teachers who used to teach elimu ya siasa they all complained that they were not consulted to give their views on the change of language of instruction. Several of the teachers told that they had enjoyed teaching elimu ya siasa but could not teach civics since their command of English was not good enough for that. Others told about the lively

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discussions they could have when they were teaching siasa and the passivity of the pupils when they now had to teach the new subject in English.

They felt that the change of medium of instruction was done in an undemocratic manner since the teachers who taught siasa had not been consulted. Several of the teachers also mentioned the problem of undemocratic participation in the classroom since those who are proficient in the English language (though very few and coming from the better equipped homes) become dominant in discussions when they are supposed to be held in English.

Gathering from her own experience as a siasa and civics teacher Mkwizu (2002:16) tells that many colleagues were disturbed by the change of medium of instruction from Kiswahili to English: there were two main problems that the majority of us faced:

• The first one was making the class alive by cracking a Kiswahili joke popularly known as mchapo.

• The second one, as many of us admitted, was how to stress a point. When we were teaching in Kiswahili one of the strategies that we employed was repetition of the point in different words. As we are now forced to teach in English we came to learn that we could hardly apply this strategy because we lack the stylistic varieties of expressing the point. The alternative that many of us opt for is code switching.

The teaching strategy Mkwizu here explains so well is one all of us who have been teachers or teacher educators have used and/or recommended to student teachers to make use of. When we lecture to a group of students and see that some of them have not really grasped what we have been saying, we repeat what we said, but with different words. In order to use this strategy one has to be in command of a rather large vocabulary in the language of instruction.

Both through observations and through questions asked Mwinsheikhe (2001, 2002) aimed at finding out the extent to which students and teachers code-mix or code-switch during science lessons and under what circumstances. The majority of the teachers she interviewed -74% - (N= 68) acknowledged the existence of a grave language problem in the teaching/learning of science. Only a small proportion - 22% - (N= 20) asserted that they themselves faced no problem. It was not surprising therefore to find that most teachers - 89% - (N= 82) admitted to using Kiswahili during their teaching, while only 10% (N=9 ) claimed that they taught in English only and did not face any language problem in class. As we see from the percentages quoted some of the teachers who claimed to have no language problem indicated that they, in spite of official policy, still used Kiswahili in their teaching. These were probably teachers who they themselves had a good command of English and would probably not code-mix. They would, however, sometimes code-switch when they saw that their students did not understand.

Responding to the question: what lesson activities prompt you to switch to Kiswahili, 82% (N= 70) of the teachers who admitted that they used Kiswahili during lessons said they

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used it to clarify difficult or key concepts of the lessons. But as we saw in the example on code-mixing above, the clarification of a key concept may just mean using that concept in Kiswahili without any attempt even to translate it into English. The next common reason mentioned was to give instructions for practical work and assignments. This answer was given by 15% (N=13) of the teachers.

Since most teachers use Kiswahili during lessons, it is not surprising that Mwinsheikhe found that a good proportion of them - 58 (63%) – say that they allow students to do the same. It would be natural for teachers who code-switch to allow students to code-switch without any qualm, especially in lower forms.

Use of Kiswahili during group work So far we have been dealing with teacher-led teaching to a whole class of students where a teacher stands in front of the class and expects everyone to listen to him or her. Many teachers also in African class-rooms have now been trained to and are using group work and group discussions as a teaching method. This is done to facilitate learning by making the students active. This teaching method however presupposes a good command of language by the students.

While I was lecturing to large classes of a couple of hundred students and more at the University of Dar es Salaam, I often tried to liven up the lectures and activate the students by giving them buzzing questions to discuss in small groups for three to five minutes. I wrote the questions on the blackboard in English but very soon realized that all the buzzing groups were buzzing away in Kiswahili.

According to a survey made by Mwinsheikhe of the activity most favored by Tanzanian secondary school students in science lessons group discussions came near the top. The reasons they gave for their choice were clearly linked to the problem they normally had with the medium of instruction and the fact that during group work they could communicate freely in Kiswahili or “Kiswanglish”. Here are some excerpts of student responses:

When you are discussing in a group you do not panic to use poor English. (School CS2 Form III student)

Because for most of times the teacher is not there to say you that is not English. (School SSS Form III student) (Mwinsheikhe, 2002:77)

The vast majority of the teachers Mwinsheikhe interviewed admitted that students normally switch to Kiswahili when they are doing group work. They said that working in groups entails a much more relaxed atmosphere when students feel more free to code-switch. A small proportion of teachers -7%- (N=6) maintained that students conducted group work in English. Mwinsheikhe from her own experience doubts this answer and asks: How this would be accomplished in Form I for example is a point for further speculation. She refers

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to Osaki (1995) who found that even at Form III level teachers had problems in conducting discussions in English only because student participation then became negligible.

The disobedient teachers using a pragmatic coping strategy In Tanzania teachers are not supposed to mix Kiswahili words into English when they teach in at secondary or tertiary level. In connection with her research Halima Mwinsheikhe (2003) interviewed seven school inspectors and regional educational officers about the use of Kiswahili in secondary class-rooms in Tanzania. They all said they were aware of the fact that much of the teaching in secondary schools was going on in “Kiswanglish” a mixture of Kiswahili and English and that many teachers are no longer “afraid” to use some Kiswahili when teaching. They would continue even if the Head of school was seen to pass by. One of the interviewees who was a school inspector remarked:

When I am inspecting a lesson I am aware of the fact that the teacher is ‘staging an English only lesson’ because I can hear some Kiswahili used in another class. (School inspector)

In a paper by Ferguson (2002) he highlights that the use of code-switching, a pragmatic coping strategy used by teachers, lacks legitimacy and is consequently neglected or marginalized in teacher education. He also notes that official attitudes towards this practice in various post-colonial settings range from neutral in South Africa to extremely negative in Hong Kong. He also argues that code-switching should not be seen as a dysfunctional form of speech behaviour, but “on the contrary an important, even necessary, communicative resource for the management of learning, especially for pupils with limited proficiency in the official instructional medium.” (Ferguson, 2002:9). He cites Adendorff (1993:142) who has done research among Zulu speaking learners and who finds code-switching a highly functional strategy: “it is a communicative resource which enables teachers and pupils to accomplish a considerable number and range of social and educational objectives.” But when monolingual curriculum “experts” from the north come to Africa, they have a different opinion on this issue. The curriculum worked out by the US-based firm Creative Associates for the non-formal COPE schools in Uganda is a case in point.

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The advice from “experts” from the North In a Government White Paper in Uganda the following language policy is laid down:

a) In rural areas the medium of instruction from P.1 to P.4 will be the relevant local languages; and from P.5 to P.8 English will be the medium of instruction.

b) In the urban areas the medium of instruction will be English throughout the primary cycle.

c) Kiswahili and English will be taught as compulsory subjects to all children throughout the primary cycle, both in rural and urban areas. Emphasis in terms of allocations of time and in the provision of instructional materials, facilities and teachers will, however, be gradually placed on Kiswahili as the language possessing greater capacity for uniting Ugandans and for assisting rapid social development.

d) The relevant area language will also be taught as a subject in primary school; this applies to both rural and urban areas. (Government of Uganda, 1992:19)

The district Bushenyi that I visited in August 1997 is a rural district where one would have expected the language of instruction to be the local language.

One would especially have expected this because the instructors in the non-formal COPE (Complimentary Opportunity for Primary Education)3 schools, that I visited on behalf of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, have few years of schooling, little teacher training, inadequate command of English, and the pupils are often drop-outs from the regular school or come from very poor homes with no exposure to English.

3 These so-called non-formal schools cater for children above normal school entry age who either never went to school or dropped out of school at an early stage. The teaching goes on for only three hours a day in order for the children to be able to participate in other activities and chores after school. Some of the children at the COPE centers are bread-winners in their homes because their parents and other close relatives have died of AIDS.

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Yet the Instructor's Guide to COPE instructors (written by the US-based firm

“Creative Associates”4) states: The COPE curriculum follows the official government language policy. In the first year, use the local language for all subjects except English. In English lessons use English only. In the second and third years, use English for all subjects except mother tongue. Obviously there must be some overlap, but you must be using English only by term two year two (Elphick, 1995:17, emphasis in original).

As we see the Instructor's Guide does not follow the official government language policy since that policy advocates use of the local language as medium of instruction up to P4 in rural areas, which are the areas where the COPE schools are mostly located. The same Instructor's Guide further argues that “since there is extremely limited exposure to English in the environment of the average COPE child, it is absolutely essential that, when the time comes for using English as the medium of instruction, English should be used for all subjects.” (emphasis mine) One recognises that pupils often can have problems understanding various subjects when the medium of instruction is English. One recommendation for solving this problem is by:

teaching in English and forcing pupils into a situation where they cannot survive without learning it ...after learning has been introduced in the local language, the teacher must teach in English only, and preferably use English for all activities within the learning centre (ibid:17, emphasis in original).

The US-based firm does not seem to realize that the “extremely limited exposure to English in the environment of the average COPE child” makes the use of English as a language of instruction an effective barrier to learning for the average COPE child. By insisting on the

4 A policy of international competitive bidding forced on the Government of Uganda by the World Bank was undertaken for organizing instructor training and for developing textbooks and instructor manuals for COPE schools in Uganda. Even though the curriculum development Center in Uganda tried to compete for the bid, they lost against the American firm Creative Associates International Inc., based in Washington DC that won the tender. (For further information on the difficulties meeting African countries trying to decide on their own curricula see Brock-Utne, 2000, 2001,2002a.) There is reason to believe that Uganda’s own curriculum developers would have respected the official language policy for rural areas and also would have been familiar with the code-mixing and code-switching strategies teachers use to bring information across to children who are not familiar with the language of instruction.

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use of English only in the non-formal COPE schools the firm argues against the use of code-mixing or even code-switching, the most effective strategy used by African teachers, who have to teach through a language neither they themselves nor their students know well.

A situation of rote learning, memorization, parroting and cheating at exams

Safe Talk – chorus teaching

When teachers try to be loyal to the official language policy and avoid code-switching they instead practice either chorus teaching – where children repeat in chorus or so-called “safe talk”.

The chorus teaching owes itself much to the fact that the teacher does not have a vocabulary in the language of instruction which is large enough to employ an interactive teaching method. Observations that I have made in Tanzania both in secondary school class-rooms and when I have taught university students show that if a teacher attempts to engage her/his students in group work or group discussions the groups will immediately switch into Kiswahili. Most of the time the teacher will either use what Heller and Martin-Jones (2001:13) have called “safe talk” or will code-mix or code-switch in the class-room.

Heller and Martin-Jones (2001:13) define “safe talk” as: Classroom talk that allows participation without any risk of loss of face for the teacher and the learners and maintains an appearance of “doing the lesson”, while in fact little learning is actually taking place... This particular style of interaction arises from teachers’ attempts to cope with the problem of using a former colonial language, which is remote from the learners’ experiences outside school, as the main medium of instruction.

Rubagumya (2003) found in a study he has made of the new English medium primary schools in Tanzania the main manifestation of “safe talk” in an encouragement of chorus answers from pupils, repeating phrases or words after the teacher and copying notes from the blackboard. He found very little encouragement of pupils to freely express their ideas without the teacher’s control. The two examples below are taken from Rubagumya’s research and illustrate “safe-talk” as observed in many classrooms of the sample schools. T: So you have positive fifty-five plus positive what now? PP: (chorus) ten T: Positive ten. What do you get then? P: (one student answers) Positive sixty-five T: Sixty-five positive. How many got that? Only one… any question?… no question. Do this

exercise

[Maths std. 3 school D2]

In this example, the teacher is going through the exercise he had given pupils earlier. After making the corrections, he asks how many pupils got the right answer. Only one out of a

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class of 35 pupils had the right answer. The teacher then asks whether pupils have any questions. After a very brief moment (about 2 seconds) he decides that pupils have understood, and he proceeds to give them another exercise. Here both the teacher and the pupils are practising “safe talk”. Since only one pupil got the right answer, we would have expected several pupils to ask some questions. But they hesitate because they don’t want to lose face. The teacher on his part waits for only about two seconds and proceeds with the next task. He doesn’t want to encourage pupils to ask questions because either this might expose his lack of fluency in English, or because he is trying to cover the syllabus. Either way, this is “safe talk”. T: number twelve… let us go together... one two three PP: (chorus): The doctor and his wife has gone out T: The doctor and his wife has gone out… Kevin? Kevin: The doctor and his wife have gone out T: The doctor and his wife have gone out … is he correct? PP: (Chorus): YEES!

(English std 2 school A3)

Here the teacher is trying to correct the pupils when they say “the doctor and his wife has”. Kevin gets the right answer “the doctor and his wife have”. Once the other pupils confirm this as correct in a chorus, the teacher does not care to explain why the right form of the verb is have and not has. There is no way he can find out from the chorus answer whether every pupil understands the difference between have and has, but accepting the chorus answer is “safe” both for him and for his pupils.

There is teaching going on – but learning? That is doubtful. Learners learn to parrot, copy notes and memorize. These strategies are used even at the university.

Madesa – copying notes

Grace Puja (2001) who, for her Ph. D. did research among female undergraduates in Tanzania tells that madesa was one of the many words she learnt through her study and did not know from before. In the following extract a second-year engineering student describes what is meant by madesa/kudesa and the conditions which are favourable to madesa/kudesa:

We are required to do many laboratory practicals, Demetermetres, volta meters / speedometers...But most of the time we write those... without understanding anything...one takes data...connects electrical wires, takes results, but does not know the purpose of what one is doing and one does not realize that until the time when one has to do the data analysis and write the report. One cannot write the report on ones own, so we have this thing known as madesa, which means copying...Some teachers give the same instructions for laboratory practicals every year, they do not change. We take past papers, and we copy, this means that we do not learn anything. We just change the numbers, for instance, lets say for Current, and we may use another way to calculate the results but we copy the

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same formula and we write our own numbers instead of the old ones. In this way, we really do not learn anything from these laboratory practicals (an English translation of comments made in Kiswahili by engineering participants, April 1997). (Puja, 2003)

The participants in her study mentioned that due to a lack of teaching and learning resources, they had devised academic survival strategies, such as kudesa or symbiosis. They said that in essence both words mean copying materials from their classmates or from other sources. They said that after copying, they cram word for word and later reproduce the same information in a test or examinations as Vero states:

As my colleague has just said, we do not study in order to understand. The only thing one can do is cram everything, look for past papers and solve past problems in order to pass examinations. If you ask a question the teacher may say that you are wasting time. Or she/he may look at you and laugh [at you]. So, all these things really discourage us from asking any questions, even when we do not understand what is being taught. This especially affects us girls. Sometimes when a female student asks a question the teacher might say, “Is that a question?” and he will then start to laugh at the female student, so teachers really discourage us (Puja, 2003:124).

The participants in Puja’s research told that they fear failing their exams and fear that teachers are unfair. This is also reflected in students’ tendency to cheat when writing papers and examinations. Passing exams in a foreign language represents special problems.

Exam time

The great majority of teachers in Mwinsheikhe’s study - 88% (N=81) indicated that when students wrote exams or answered tests most of them would perform much better in questions that did not require long explanations. Questions of this type are multiple choice and matching questions, and questions that require stating the answers in single words or in very short phrases. Conversely they performed very poorly in questions that required explanations and or verbal accounts. In both Form I and III the scores for the pre-tests that Mwinsheikhe conducted which were in English, were rather low. Practically all students attempted to answer the multiple choice items. The short answer and essay questions were skipped by a good number of the students, and even those students who attempted to answer, what they wrote could hardly qualify as essays. In a Form I class one student simply scribbled sielewi (I do not understand) in Kiswahili on the test paper.

Mwinsheikhe tells that 71% (N=65) of the secondary school teachers in her study attributed the low performance of students in science subjects to poor command of the MOI (medium of instruction). Some teachers - 16% - (N=12) - said that the low performance is also due to other factors like difficult or ambiguous test questions. The rest said time normally allocated was not enough for students to do all the questions. In a way these reasons can be linked, albeit indirectly, to the language problem. For example allocated time

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may seem short if students have to spend most of it in trying to understand the questions and construct answers because they learned the concepts in Kiswahili or at best in ‘Kiswanglish’, while examinations are in English and answers have to be in English only.

The National Examinations Council of Tanzania, NECTA (1993) maintains that the problem of language incapacitates students such that they fail to express themselves clearly in writing. This leads to low performance in National Examination. Some students opt to use Kiswahili to give their answers in examinations even though they know that this is not allowed and that their answers will not count. This observation is made by 53% (N=49) of the teachers in Mwinsheikhe’s study while 37% (N=34) did not encounter examination responses in Kiswahili and the rest – 10% (N=9) did not indicate their choice.

Mwinsheike tells that from her own classroom experience and as a National examinations marker she observed that most of the questions that were answered in Kiswahili were answered correctly. However, according to the official marking regulations such answers are not supposed to be awarded any marks at all. So here we clearly see a problem that students run into who by their teachers have been used to code-switching and code-mixing, a strategy teachers have used in order to have them understand the subject matter. Even though this might be the second best way to have them understand (the best would have been to use mother tongue or Kiswahili entirely), their understanding is of little help when they cannot express it in English at exam time.

The gravest problem when it comes to code-mixing, code-switching and full translations in the African classroom may be just this; the difficulties for students who have learnt through these strategies to perform well in exams when the learning strategies they have so far employed are outlawed. The code-mixing, the code-switching and the translation strategies slow down the learning process, do neither lead to a better mastery of the medium of instruction nor to a development of the learner’s most familiar language.

And what are the merits of code-mixing, code-switching and full translations? Without these strategies, and they are strategies resorted to out of despair as many of the examples in this article show, hardly anything would be learnt in class-rooms where the official medium functions as a barrier to knowledge. The use of these strategies may lead to a better mastery of the subject matter, but a mastery the students may not be able to express in the language required of them on the day of examination. Answering exam questions in English is a problem also for university students in Tanzania.

Multiple choice and finger coding

Based on the interview responses, Puja (2001) got in her research success in University examinations seems more to be a demonstration of a person’s ability to “reproduce” whatever is to be reproduced than understanding what one is taught, cheating in examinations, or doing “group examinations” as one medical teacher ironically put it. Puja (2003) mentions that she was told that the five fingers of the hand have been coded into A B

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C D E such that the thumb is A, and the index finger is E. This system is used during examination in programs which depend on multiple choice questions. She relates:

I was told that on the day of the examinations, the seating arrangement is based on the operation of this system. The students who know the answers sit in the locations where they can be easily seen and followed by others when responding to various questions (Puja, 2003:124).

At least two participants interviewed by Puja confirmed that cheating in examinations is a common thing and some of them were caught cheating in university examinations. One was Bahati who was caught cheating in the Annual University Examinations. Bahati further explained that everybody at MUCHS5 cheats. She said that she and her friends were just unfortunate because they were caught, but the way some of those examinations are set, it is impossible to pass without cheating. Bahati also said that even on that day when she and her colleagues were found cheating, they were not the only ones. When Puja asked Bahati how she felt about cheating, Bahati told her that she would probably not cheat again but that other students at MUCHS, who were not caught, would continue.6

The use of English as the language of instruction prevents the learning of correct English One of the Tanzanian participants in the LOITASA project group, Dr. Martha Qorro (2002), is herself a Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages at the University of Dar es Salaam. The reason why she is a great promoter of the use of Kiswahili as the language of instruction in Tanzanian secondary schools has to do with the fact that she, as an English teacher, has seen that children neither learn English (they learn bad and incorrect English) nor subject matter. The English language has become a barrier to knowledge.

5 Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences. 6 Puja mentions that she was very surprised to note that while describing the cheating incident to her,

Bahati (fictitious name) was not even sorry for what she and her classmates did.

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In the English language newspaper The Guardian in Tanzania the editors started a

Kiswahili medium debate in the spring of 20027. In an editorial of 30 April 2002th the editor openly warns Kiswahili medium advocates. On May 29 th Martha Qorro gave a substantial answer to the editor based on her own observations and research.

Here are some quotes from her answer: In terms of language use in public secondary schools in Tanzania most students and the majority of teachers do not understand English. For example, the headmaster of one of the secondary schools once admitted that, of the 45 teachers in his school only 3 understood English well and used it correctly. This in effect means that the other 42 teachers used incorrect English in their teaching. This is not an isolated case. Those who have been working closely with secondary school classroom situations will agree with me that this situation prevails in most public secondary schools in Tanzania.

Dr. Qorro claims that it is the prevailing situation in the secondary schools in Tanzania, where most teachers teach in incorrect English, that forces her to argue for the change of medium of instruction to Kiswahili. She feels confident that students can, in fact, learn English better than is currently the case when it is taught well as a subject, and eliminated as the medium of instruction. In her own words:

The use of English as a medium actually defeats the whole purpose of teaching English language. For example, let us suppose that, in the school mentioned above the 3 teachers who use English correctly are the teachers of English language, and the other 42 are teachers of subjects other than English. Is it not the case that the efforts of the 3 teachers of English are likely to be eroded by the 42 teachers who use incorrect English in teaching their subjects? If we want to improve the teaching and learning of English in Tanzania secondary schools, I believe, that has to include the elimination of incorrect English to which students have been exposed from the time they began learning it (Qorro, 2002).

In her article Martha Qorro argues for the elimination of incorrect English by not using it as a medium of instruction. She knows that many people are put off by this suggestion because of the belief that by using it as a medium of instruction students would master English better. Though she agrees that mastering English is important she feels that the best way to

7 The debate has picked up momentum during the fall of 2003 with almost daily debates in many of the Kiswahili newspapers and continued debates also in the Guardian (Wilfred Kahumuza in the Guardian of 10.October 2003; Brock-Utne, 2003).

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do this is through improved teaching of English language as a subject and not to the use of English as a medium.

And then she adds: Not everyone who recommends a change of medium of instruction to Kiswahili is a Kiswahili Professor. I for one am not a Kiswahili Professor, I have been teaching English for the last 25 years, and to me a change to Kiswahili medium means:

• Eliminating the huge amount of incorrect English to which our secondary school students are exposed.

• Enhancing students' understanding of the contents of their subjects and hence creating grounds on which they can build their learning of English and other languages.

• Eliminating the false dependence on English medium as a way of teaching/ learning English, addressing and evaluating the problems of teaching English.

• Impressing on all those concerned that English language teaching is a specialized field just like History, Geography, Physics, Mathematics, etc. It is thus unreasonable and sometimes insulting to teachers of English when it is assumed that teachers of all subjects can assist in the teaching of English.

It halts the development of the Kiswahili language

At this point in time, no university in Sub-Saharan Africa has an indigenous African language as the language of instruction. The languages of instruction at the universities in Sub-Saharan Africa are the European languages English, French, Portuguese, Dutch8 (in South Africa), and Italian (when the university in Somalia was still functioning).9

8 Afrikaans, the language of the Boers and also the Coloured of South Africa is, according to Dutch people I have talked with in South Africa, 95% Dutch.

9 In Somalia the language of instruction in all the faculties except the Faculty of Education was Italian (even though the language of instruction in primary school was Somali and in secondary school English) because the University got development aid from Italy. The Faculty of Education was, however, sponsored by the Americans and therefore English was the language of instruction there (Personal communication from Hassan Keynan from Somalia, who attended my "Education in Africa" seminar while in Norway, see also Warsame, 2001).

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Ali Mazrui (1996) argues that the choice of European languages as mediums of

instruction in African universities has had profound cultural consequences for the societies served by those universities. He gives as an example professional Japanese scientists who can organise a conference and discuss professional matters entirely in Japanese. (He could for that matter also have mentioned Korean, German, Italian, Norwegian, or Finnish scientists who do the same.) Mazrui states: “But a conference of African scientists, devoted to scientific matters, conducted primarily in an African language, is for the time being sociologically impossible” (Mazrui, 1996: 4).

Generally Mazrui is correct when he maintains that almost all black African intellectuals conduct their most sophisticated conversations in European languages. “It is because of this that intellectual and scientific dependency in Africa is inseparable from linguistic dependency” (Mazrui, 1996: 4). Mazrui quotes Jomo Kenyatta in the old colonial Kenya, who said: “When the white man came to Africa he had the Bible and we had the land. And now? We have the Bible and he has the land” (:5), Culture - including language - was offered in exchange for material goods. The West exported its ideas and languages and imported riches.

For the further growth and development of a language, its use as language of instruction at higher levels is of fundamental importance. The west - African educational researcher Adama Ouane from Mali, now the Director of the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg, Germany has accurately observed:

Unless these languages (the indigenous African languages) can step beyond the door of primary schooling, and face the challenges of secondary and higher education, with increased number of subjects to deal with, their modernisation will be achieved only half-way (Ouane, 1991: 10).

At the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania there is, however, one department and one institute that use an African language as the language of instruction: the Department of Kiswahili and the Institute of Kiswahili Research. In the department of Kiswahili at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania prior to 1970 the courses in this department were all taught in English. Makini Roy-Campbell (1992a, 1992b), in discussing the history of the department, responds to the frequent argument that the African languages do not have a vocabulary that is developed enough to be languages of scholarship and instruction at higher levels in the educational system. She holds that this department provides an excellent and realistic example of the coinage of technical words that was undertaken in the process of changing from English to Kiswahili as the medium of instruction. I have elsewhere (Brock-Utne, 2000) mentioned that before 1970 there were no Kiswahili terms for guttural sounds and phonemes, nor even linguistics and vocabulary, but once the decision was made to teach the courses in Kiswahili words were developed in the process of teaching and later standardized. Some words were used side by side as synonyms. English terminologies were used until Kiswahili terms were developed. Some English terms became Kiswahilized and

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some terms were found in some of the other languages of Tanzania. The process of creating new words was done with the assistance of all teachers in the Department of Kiswahili and the Institute for Kiswahili Research. There is in Tanzania a wealth of terminology in Kiswahili developed by the Kiswahili Council of Tanzania (Mutasa, 2003). The fact remains that there needs to be the political will to implement these policies. A language develops and grows through use.

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