Multilingual Learning : Assessment, Ideologies and Policies in Sub-saharan Africa

This edited volume provides the follow up to Erling et al.’s (2021) Multilingual Learning and Language Supportive Pedagogies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The strategies put forward in Volume 1 included multilingual pedagogies that allow students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires, translanguaging and other language-supportive pedagogies. While there is great traction in the pedagogical strategies proposed in Volume 1, limited progress has been made in terms of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Thus, the main focus of this follow-up volume is to explore the question of why former colonial languages and monolingual approaches continue to be used as the dominant languages of education, even when we have multilingual pedagogies and materials that could and do work and despite substantial evidence that learners have difficulties when taught in a language they do not understand.

This book offers perspectives to answer this question through focusing on the internal and external pressures which impact the capacity for implementing multilingual strategies in educational contexts at regional, national and community levels. Chapters provide insights into how to better understand and work within these contemporary constraints and challenge dominant monoglossic discourses which inhibit the implementation of multilingual education in SSA. The volume focuses on three main areas which have proven to be stumbling blocks to the effective implementation of multilingual education to date, namely: assessment, ideology and policy.

An insightful collection that will be of great interest to academics, researchers and practitioners in the fields of language education, language-in-education policy and educational assessments in the wide range of multilingual contexts in Africa.

Colin Reilly is a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Stirling.

Feliciano Chimbutane is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Eduardo Mondlane University.

John Clegg is a freelance education consultant based in the UK.

Casmir Rubagumya is a Professor of Language Education at St John’s University of Tanzania.

Elizabeth J. Erling is a Professor of English Language Teaching Research and Methodology at the University of Education Upper Austria and Elise-Richter Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna.