Tanzanian Association Oslo

Kiswahili,

Norwegian

or English as a

Language of

instruction

By Birgit Brock-Utne

18.02. 2008 08:56:26 EAT

I have only recently been made aware of an article called ``Kiswahili and English which is which in to-day`s world?`` written by Professor Issa M.Omari and published in the Guardian 15th of December 2007.

Since I am personally attacked in the article and since the article is full of mistakes and misinformation I see a need to reply.

The article is also full of invectives, insults and strong non-academic language.

I shall refrain from answering the same way. People who use strong and insulting language are normally arguing a weak case. So is also Prof.Omari.

Misinformation about Norway Omari writes that in Norway ``English is spreading like fire due to earlier insular policies that advocated local medium of instruction there.`` This is incorrect.

English is not spreading like fire in Norway, especially not as a medium of instruction. Omari also writes that primary schools in Norway are ``going either English medium or making English compulsory from day one of schooling``.

This is a big lie. There are no English medium primary schools in Norway apart from a couple of international schools.

We also have a French school where the language of instruction is French.

The few children attending these schools are mostly sons and daughters of diplomats, most of whom have parents who do not master Norwegian.

This exception entails so few children that it actually does not count in the larger picture.

The medium of instruction all through primary and secondary school and at the university level is Norwegian.

Most of the doctoral theses and about 80% of the master theses at the Faculty of Education at the University of Oslo are written in Norwegian.

Pupils in Norway study in their own language like all children in the developed world do.

Finnish pupils study in Finnish, Greek pupils in Greek, German pupils in German, Dutch children in Dutch, Hungarian children in Hungarian and so on.

Even in the island of Iceland, with just 300 000 inhabitants, pupils study in their own language, Icelandic, all through primary, secondary and tertiary education.

When I was the Head of Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Dar es Salaam (1989 - 1991) I was constantly asked by Tanzanian students if I could make it possible for them to study in Norway when I returned home.

I had to tell them that in case they wanted to study in Norway, they had to learn Norwegian.

We did not have a single course at the Faculty of Education taught in any other language than Norwegian.

That situation has changed over the last ten years and we now have three master courses run in English.

Two of the courses have 80 to 90% non-Norwegian speaking foreign students.

The course I am a Director of, Master of Comparative and International Education, has now 70% foreign students.

It impresses me every year that the Norwegian students in my class, who have never had English as the language of instruction, write better essays in English than the Tanzanian students (and they come to us with top grades) who have had English as the language of instruction for at least nine years!

Language of instruction vs learning a foreign language

When the Norwegian students in my class write better English than the Tanzanian students it can probably be explained by two facts:``They have learnt complicated academic concepts in the language they normally speak, i.e. Norwegian. This makes it easier for them to understand and master these concepts in a foreign language

``The Norwegian students have learnt English well as a foreign language from teachers who are specialists in teaching foreign languages.

Teaching foreign languages is an art, is a profession. It is unfair to demand of teachers of science, mathematics and history that they should also be good English teachers.

We do not demand of English teachers that they also teach mathematics.

Prof.Omari commits the fallacy to think that the best way to learn a foreign language is to have it as a language of instruction.

This is incorrect. But it is a misconception nourished by many people.

One would think that a professor of education would help uproot this misconception instead of spreading it further.

If Omari instead of trusting a popular magazine like Newsweek would study research findings both from Tanzania and other African countries, he would see that the use of a foreign language as the language of instruction is a barrier to knowledge, to effective learning of subject matter and to developing further the familiar African language as well as learning the foreign language - English in the case of Tanzania.

The well-known Yoruba experiments in Nigeria showed that pupils who were taught in Yoruba all through the six years of primary school did better than pupils who were only taught Yoruba for three years and then switched to English.

The first group did better in all subjects, including English! The same results have come out of a recent study in Ethiopia.

Those students who studied in their own language - Oromifa, Tigrinya or Amharic all through the eight years of primary school did better in most subjects, especially in science and mathematics, than those students who switched to English after the fourth grade.

Four books full of research findings have come out of the LOITASA (Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa) project.

In 2007 three students, two from Tanzania and one from South Africa got their doctorates under this project.

If Omari had taken the time to study any of these scientific publications, he would have seen that one result which comes up in all of them is that students learn much better in a familiar language.

The achievement scores were much higher in South Africa when students were taught in isiXhosa than in English. Also the spread of scores was much smaller.

The same result was found in Tanzania. When English was used, the majority got very low achievement scores while a few (those with well-to-do parents, private tutoring etc) did quite well.

In the LOITASA project we are concerned with the masses of Africans, not with the elite.

There is little doubt that the retention of English as a medium of instruction in secondary school in Tanzania happens to the detriment of the poorer segments of society.

Selective commissioning of research activities
Prof. Omari maintains that the LOITASA project is commissioned research. Again the professor is wrong.

Instead of spreading such misinformation through the newspaper Mr.Omari could have talked with his colleagues both in the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences about the start of this project.

It was started by a group of researchers at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Western Cape who were interested in the language of instruction issue in Africa.

I remember when Prof. Sumra, who was the first Tanzanian coordinator of LOITASA, and I discussed this project idea that he said that he was doubtful that donors would support such a project.

Donors - especially the British, Americans and French - are known for promoting their own languages as the LOI also for pupils who do not speak these languages.

I told him that fortunately we did not have to think about the type of research donors would like since the money came from NUFU - an independent research institution in Norway building up collaborative research between researchers in developing countries and Norwegian researchers.

The decision on which projects to support is made by a board of researchers.

Though the money comes from the developing aid budget, NORAD (our bilateral aid agency) does not at all mix into the decision on what projects to fund.

The idea of conducting some experiments in school using a familiar language for an extended period of time actually came from the South African project leader Prof. Zubeida Desai, the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Cape at our initial planning meeting in Bagamoyo in January 2000.

The spread of English Prof. Omari is correct in noting that English, the language of market liberalism and capitalism, is spreading in the world, but fortunately not as a language of instruction.

It is spreading as a first foreign language, normally to the detriment of languages like German and Russian.

In Norway German used to be the most important foreign language before the Second World War. My father and his generation spoke much better German than English.

When I grew up we had three foreign languages as compulsory subjects in school; German, English and French.

Now youngsters have more English than we had but they only take one second foreign language and can choose between German, French, Spanish and now increasingly Chinese.

Most people in the world speak Chinese, not English.

Most people in the European Union speak German as their first language, not English.

The Germans are not at all contemplating switching to English as the LOI, but they are learning English as a foreign language and are, probably for historical reasons, rather low key when it comes to promoting German as the lingua franca in Europe.

I worked in Mongolia five years ago and noticed that there was a great demand for courses in English.

The whole Mongolian society was switching not only from a planned economy to market liberalism but also from Russian to English as the first foreign language.

But the language of instruction was Mongolian as it had also been under Russian influence.

When I was a Visiting Professor in Japan in the fall of 2002 I was surprised to notice that no one spoke any English.

I could only use English at the small research centre where I worked.

When I lectured in Tokyo and Osaka my lectures were translated into Japanese. I had to learn some Japanese to get by at all.

Also lecturing to researchers in Santiago in Chile I had to be translated into Spanish. English is not as widespread as Omari seems to think.

Birgit Brock-Utne is Professor of Education and Development at the University of Oslo, Norway and Former Professor of Educational Psychology (1987-1991) at the University of DSM.

• SOURCE: Guardian