A comparative and interdisciplinary study of language issues in education in five Afican countries: Botswana, Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire and Zimbabwe. This book focuses on how the social, economic and political context affects classroom practice.

This edited collection provides unprecedented insight into the emerging field of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Multilingual education is claimed to have many benefits, amongst which are that it can improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the medium of instruction and are consequently struggling to learn. The book represents a range of Sub-Saharan school contexts and describes how multilingual strategies have been developed and implemented within them to support the learning of content and language. It looks at multilingual learning from several points of view, including ‘translanguaging’, or the use of multiple languages – and especially African languages – for learning and language-supportive pedagogy, or the implementation of a distinct pedagogy to support learners working through the medium of a second language. The book puts forward strategies for creating materials, classroom environments and teacher education programmes which support the use of all of a student’s languages to improve language and content learning. The contexts which the book describes are challenging, including low school resourcing, poverty and low literacy in the home, and school policy which militates against the use of African languages in school. The volume also draws on multilingual education approaches which have been successfully carried out in higher resource countries and lend themselves to being adapted for use in SSA. It shows how multilingual learning can bring about transformation in education and provides inspiration for how these strategies might spread and be further developed to improve learning in schools in SSA and beyond. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

In different but complementary ways, the chapters in this collection provide a deeper understanding of socio-cultural processes in various parts of the African continent. They do so in the context of contemporary mediated processes of globalization, and emphasize the agency of Africans.

This book addresses major sociological issues in sub-Saharan African education today. Its fourteen contributors present a thoroughly African world-view within a sociology of education theoretical framework, allowing the reader to see where that theory is relevant to the African context and where it is not. Several of the chapters bring a much-needed cultural nuance and critical theoretical perspective to the issues at hand. The sixteen chapters thus aim to be of interest internationally, to those who work in such fields as social and political foundations of comparative and international education, and development studies, including university professors, teacher educators, researchers, school teachers, tertiary education students, consultants and policy makers.

This book offers a critical exploration of definitions, methodologies and ideologies of English-medium instruction (EMI), contributing to new understandings of translanguaging as theory and pedagogy across diverse contexts. It brings together a number of conceptual and empirical studies on translanguaging in EMI at different educational levels, in a variety of countries, with different approaches to translanguaging, different named languages, and different policies. These studies include several underrepresented contexts across the globe, providing a broad view of how translanguaging in EMI is understood in these educational settings. Furthermore, this book addresses the complexities of translanguaging through a discussion of the affordances and constraints associated with the use of multiple linguistic resources in the EMI classroom.

This book discusses current problems and policies, approaches, trends, and recruitment conditions within the education of teachers in the modern world. It investigates new research within this area, and explores various aspects prevalent in teachers and in their own and general education today. The contributions to this volume approach the topic of modern teachers from various geographical and contextual perspectives, discussing the challenges facing teachers from educational, cultural, socio-political, demographic, and economic points of view.

Languages of Instruction: Policy implications for education in Africa

How we understand education quality is inextricably linked with perspectives on social justice. Questions of inclusion, relevance and democracy in education are increasingly contested, most especially in the global South, and improving the quality of education, particularly for the most disadvantaged, has become a topic of fundamental concern for education policy makers, practitioners and the international development community. The reality experienced by many learners continues to be of inadequately prepared and poorly motivated teachers, struggling to deliver a rapidly changing curriculum without sufficient support, and often using outmoded teaching methods in over-crowded or dilapidated classrooms. Education Quality and Social Justice in the South includes contributions from leading scholars in the field of education and development. The text draws upon state of the art evidence from the five year EdQual research programme, which focuses upon raising achievement in low income countries, and demonstrates how systems of high quality universal education can be sustained. By exploring recent research initiatives to improve education quality, the importance of supporting local policy makers, educators and parents as agents of change, and students as active inquirers is highlighted, and the challenge of taking successful initiatives to scale is explained. The book is divided into three main parts: -Framing Education Quality -Planning and Policies for Quality -Implementing Quality in Schools Education Quality and Social Justice in the South argues that implementing a high quality of education using theories of social justice can inform the understanding of inclusion, relevance and democracy in education. The book should be essential reading for both students and researchers within the fields of international and comparative education, along with educational policy, poverty and development studies.

Reviews international research that is relevant to the teaching of English, language and literacy. This book locates research within theoretical context, drawing on historical perspectives.