FYI, this short news item (below, after my windy comments) is from the SABC News (seen via a Google alert). The problem of training teachers how to teach in African languages or about them is one that certainly needs more attention, especially in countries that are newly instituting policies for use of African languages as media of instruction. I'm not sure that donors concerned with education-for-all in Africa are considering this at all (I'd be pleased to learn otherwise).
It's never enough, of course, to assume that a native speaker will be able to effectively use his/her language in teaching - regardless of the language or continent. And in the case of Africa, most people however educated have had little or no formal instruction about the language that might in turn help them to use it as teachers (I'd be really interested to know if there are any statistics anywhere on the % of literate people in Africa who have had any classroom experience in their maternal language or any other indigenous language of their country). For teachers *of* the language the situation is probably even more serious - I guess that's the point of the article. Personally I remember when first learning Fulfulde in Mali, that our instructors told us Fulfulde had no rules, no grammar. These were well educated and really nice people, but aside from learning the orthography of the language, they had never studied it. And folks there generally would learn another local language by picking it up orally/aurally. The irony was that Fulfulde was then already one of the most studied African languages - there were lots of various materials published by linguists mostly outside of Africa. But none of that - or very little - came back to the home countries, not to speak of being transformed onto pedagogical materials. This is still probably a problem for a lot of languages, so maybe in addition to getting donors more interested in the problem, there needs to be a way to encourage more involvement of applied linguist specialists in African languages. Don Osborn Teachers 'not trained to teach African languages' http://www.sabcnews.com/south_africa/education/0,2172,132211,00.html July 31, 2006, 12:00 South African teachers are not properly trained to teach African languages according to Naledi Pandor, the education minister, who was speaking during the opening of a One Language Colloquium in Cape Town today. A team of academics and language experts gathered in the Cape to try and hammer out a strategy to develop language teachers. At the core of the meeting were issues dealing with increased use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction, improved ability in second languages, and preparing pupils to communicate in at least one African language. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
