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Notes 2
KISWAHILI
AS A LANGUAGE OF INSTRUCTION
Although
Kiswahili is widely spoken in all these East African member states, it is only
in Tanzania that the language has been
given the status of both the national language and that of the medium of
instruction in all basic education institutions.
Tanzania,
along with Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, belongs to the East African
community, a regional intergovernmental organization that aspires to lead the
five countries into a political federation (East African community website).
Kiswahili is the African lingua franca
of Tanzania. In the education system it serves as the
language of instruction at primary school level. From secondary school and
onwards, however the medium of instruction is English. This is an issue that
has caused a lot of debate over the years. Many publications and a lot of
research on the issue suggest that the current language policy is an obstacle
to effective learning and teaching because students as well as lecturers are
not sufficiently competent in English. Therefore it has been argued that the
medium of instruction should be Kiswahili, also at post primary level.
Although it seems obvious to many
educationists that learners learn best through a language they understand well,
there is also considerable support for retaining the English medium in
Tanzania. The proponents of the English medium often argue that globalisation
makes it important to keep the English medium, that the Kiswahili language
lacks the necessary vocabulary to function as an academic language or that such
a change is too costly for a developing country like Tanzania.
The main objective of this study is to
explore and gain insight into the various views concerning the medium of
instruction at post-primary level in Tanzania with a special focus on higher
education and the University of Dar es Salaam. The opinions of lecturers,
professors and students were sought through open-ended interviews, employing
the interview guide approach. The study also involved document analysis of
Government policy documents, newspapers and earlier studies and publications on
the issue
OVERVIEW AND HISTORY
Tanzania, like many African countries,
boasts a wealth of indigenous languages. At last count, over 127 languages were
spoken in this country of 37 million on the east coast of Africa (Gordon 2005).
Tanzania differs from some of its neighbors in that a lingua franca, Swahili,
is spoken as a second language by a vast majority of the population and is a
straightforward choice for a national language. Swahili is a Bantu language in
structure and vocabulary, making it closely related to many of the country's
local languages, but it also draws a great deal of its vocabulary from Arabic
due to the influences of coastal trade. Swahili is the mother tongue of the
Swahili people living along the coast and in Zanzibar, as well as of the
younger generations of city dwellers. An estimated 30 million rural Tanzanians
are second-language speakers, using their local language at home but Swahili
for cross-tribal communication (Gordon 2005). In 2004 the National Kiswahili
Council estimated that 99 percent of all Tanzanians spoke Swahili as at least a
second language (Brock-Utne 2005).
A common educational dilemma in
multilingual African countries is what to choose as the language of
instruction. In the absence of an ethnically neutral lingua franca, any choice
will be seen to favor certain ethno-linguistic groups at the expense of all
others. According to Alidou (2004), this was not a problem prior to
colonization, when each community used its own language to educate its
children. Education across ethno-linguistic groups was not necessary until the
arrival of colonialism and Western education, when formal schools were
introduced and children who spoke different languages were often placed in the
same classroom. The problem of multilingualism in the classroom had a simple
solution for most colonizers: simply teach in the colonial language. In
Tanzania 2 , however, the choice of a colonial language was less obvious.
Swahili, widely spoken by the arrival of the colonizers, could be used as
easily as the colonial language to bridge linguistic gaps in the classroom.
Today, Tanzania and Ethiopia are the only countries on the continent to use
national languages rather than colonial ones throughout the primary school
system (Alidou 2004).
Nonetheless, Tanzania has not escaped the
medium-of-instruction problems plaguing so many other African countries.
Although Swahili is used in primary education, English is the medium of
instruction at the secondary and post-secondary levels. There is an ongoing
debate over whether this is the optimal amount of English in Tanzanian schools,
with compelling arguments for both English and Swahili as primary media of
instruction; this controversy will be addressed in the following sections.
Swahili had its first taste of official status during the German colonial rule
beginning in the late seventeenth century, when it was designated for
nationwide use in education and colonial administration. After some controversy
over whether German or Swahili should be used as the medium of instruction in
schools, Swahili was eventually chosen, although the colonial government’s
motivation for this decision has been called into question. Rather than
desiring Tanzanians to learn in a language they spoke because it would advance
their education, did the administration perhaps hope to prevent Tanzanians from
learning German and thereby acquiring a sense of equality with their
colonizers? (Roy-Campbell 2001: 41).
The most straightforward explanation for
their decision is that since the goal of the government schools was to prepare
Tanzanians for employment in the colonial bureaucracy, using the convenient
lingua franca already spoken by nearly all potential employees both in schools
and in colonial administration was most practical. This promotion of Swahili as
a language of education and administration during German colonial rule was
instrumental in the language’s spread as a lingua franca in Tanzania
(Roy-Campbell 2001: 42).
When the British government took over
administration of German East Africa following World War I, Swahili was
preserved as the language of instruction in the first five years of primary
school, but the medium in last three years of primary and all of secondary
school was switched to English (Rubagumya 1990). Colonial administration was
also now carried out in English. Roy-Campbell (2001) argues that the British
administration had a concrete plan to train a small minority of elite
Tanzanians to assist in colonial administration, while for the rest of the
population the aim was to maintain very low levels of education.
This could be seen in the “Ten Year
Development and Welfare Plan for Tanganyika,” put out by the colonial
government, which stated that ideally 100 percent of the population would
attend primary school and only 4 percent would attend secondary school
(RoyCampbell 2001). This proposed imbalance more or less holds today, with
secondary school enrollment still drastically lower than primary school
enrollment and among the lowest in Africa at 5 to 6 percent in 2000 (World Bank
Group).
In 1954 the Tanganyika African National
Union (TANU), the political party that fought for independence from British
rule, used Swahili as a tool for uniting the different ethnic groups it sought
to represent (Rubagumya 1990). Tanganyika gained independence in 1961, with
Julius Nyerere, a former secondary-school teacher and founder of TANU, as its
first leader. His vision was of a country united under ujamaa, or “familyhood,”
a political philosophy of socialism and self-reliance. Nyerere adopted an
aggressive nation-building campaign that included promoting Swahili as the
language of public life and transforming
HOW TO LEARN A LANGUAGE FAST
– PART 5
12. Focus on comprehensible input
If your goal is learning languages fast, it’s
key to familiarize yourself with the concept of comprehensible input, or the
idea that you should read or listen at your level or slightly above it, based
on notable linguist Stephen Krashen’s theory of language acquisition. When
you’re new to learning Spanish, it’s probably too early to watch an entire
movie in Spanish. Instead, you’ll want to find material just above your
level at every stage of your language learning journey. As a beginner, this
will likely be those short, simple dialogues we discussed earlier. You’ll soon
start understanding more than you think and be ready to read stories or
non-fiction material. First, reading gives you everything you need for
comprehensible input – you can study at your own pace and highlight any vocab
you don’t know. Stories are particularly effective because their structures are
universally relatable, so the stories you know in your mother tongue can help
you understand.
Beyond that, stories allow you to have an
experience that engages your entire brain in the learning
process instead of just the left brain that may be involved when you’re
only learning grammar. Activating different parts of your brain helps you form
new neural connections, leading to better long-term language retention. “This
is how native speakers learn their own language,” Richards says, “We didn’t
learn English by studying grammar rules. We learned from our parents reading us
books.”
13. Set
Learning Goals to Learn a Foreign Language
Language-learning
goals are best if they are short, simple and easily measurable. Many of us
embark on studying a language by saying, “I want to be fluent in Japanese in
six months!” The problem is, what is fluency? Fluent in what way? Casual
conversation? Reading and writing? Discussing legal issues for your business? Instead,
it’s better to set clearly defined goals. Start with something like, “By
the end of today, I will know how to greet someone and introduce myself. In two
days, I will learn how to ask someone what they do for a living and explain to
them what I do. By the end of the week, I will know how to procure food and
avoid starvation.”
And to
get you started, I’ll give you the goal of all goals, the milestone that will
take you furthest on the path to fluency: “Master the 100 most common words in
X weeks/months.”
14. Focus on the most important vocabulary
It’s not possible for anyone to know all the
words of a language, even native speakers. It’s simply impractical anyways,
because you probably won’t need it in daily life. If your goal is to learn
quickly, then prioritise the most important vocabulary that you will use most
often. If you’re learning business English, for example, then you
probably want to focus on vocabulary related to your job. But if you’re learning
a language for fun, you likely want to prioritise slang and informal
vocabulary.
By the way, that’s the other advantage of learning a new language with Lingoda. All classes are broken down into unique topics: some for grammar, some for business, and even fun topics like philosophy. This makes it easy to learn the aspects of the language that are most relevant for you.
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