ISSUES IN THE NATIONAL AND EDUCATION LANGUAGE POLICIES
7.8 Lessons from interactional studies
In the Malawian situation, all the problems that Awoniyi outlines apply. Also in Malawi, the only teachers that have expertise in the teaching of African languages are those trained in Chichewa (now Chinyanja), as it is the only language that has been studied since 1968, from primary school up to tertiary level. Yet, policy makers elevated five other local languages which have not received any development for them to be used as instructional media.Thisclearly indicates lack of co-ordination in language planning.
Ansre (1969) in Bodomo (1997) sees the problem in sub-Saharan Africa in the right perspective with the following observation, which aptly sums up the situation in this study:
One of the root causes, if not the only one, is the lack of clearly stated policy.. .in the educational system...There is no policy statement on what should be the ultimate aim of their study, no suggestions on the content of the course and no provision for obtaining adequately trained staff and carefully prepared material.
As a result of the absence of policy there is lack of co-ordination between what is done at various levels of the education system.
The above is typical of the situation in this study where hardly any effort is made to address these issues, which makes the policy incoherent and considerably fragmented.
In interactional studies, Chick (1996) contends that historically marginalised and even stigmatised languages and their varieties should be used fairly constantly among their speakers as they wish and desire where these languages apply. The policy in Malawi
under Banda did not allow this from a constitutional perspective. The policy now is silent on the promotion of this as the ruling elite still uphold the former position. Chick's argument is that other languages and their varieties should be legitimised by actually implementing them, thereby promoting access to these institutions. Let us look at Chick's (1996) proposal for language in education and also outside these contexts. For KwaZulu- Natal, in South Africa, he proposes one possibility in which he sees merit in a policy of bilingual language. His proposal is that English would remain the main language of tuition in higher learning and isiZulu would become a secondary language as he envisages the situation:
This would mean that students would have the right to Zulu translations of examination papers, and where bilingual examiners are available, the right to write their papers in Zulu. To promote bilinguality among academics so that they could code-switch appropriately and assess papers written in Zulu, measures such as incentives to staff for becoming proficient in Zulu and affirmative action appointments for first !anguage Zulu speakers could be implemented.
(Chick, 1996, 378)
It has to be mentioned here that in the context of South Africa, it has a language policy that operates at regional and national levels, where at regional level the policy takes into account the most viable and widely used language, hence the proposal here for the use of isiZulu in institutions of higher learning. If we apply this idea to Malawi, it would first require our identification of viable regional languages to be used alongside English, in order for such a proposition to work. This would be a situation where not only English and Chinyanja are used, but wherever the identified viable indigenous languages, with a literary history such as Chitumbuka in the north and Chiyao in the south, can be employed in educational contexts and also inwider mass communication.
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Chick's (1996) study is based on the notion of empowering the majority in academics, in the workplace and in public life in general, where multilingualism is the norm (Makoni, 1999). Chick (1996) sees the implementation of such a programme as entailing what he has referred to as linguistically coping with 'social justice' for all. The problem in the case of Malawi would be that the use of local languages in higher education institutions, particularly, would demand the development of these local languages first: they have to be codified, and dictionaries and grammar books developed to be on a par with Chinyanja Once this has been achieved, financial resources permitting, the suggestion would be worth experimenting. However, this basically requires the will power on the part of educationists, who are themselves implementers.
Fairclough (1992) observes that the practice of sociolinguistics is hegemonic in nature.
The image projected is an idealised one in the sociolinguistic order, where each variety of a language is applicable in its own context and for its purposes. His contention is that this is in fact what obtains in reality, but only becomes an objective of the dominant groups.
These groups exercise power ideologically and in practice by getting the desired languages or their varieties or discourse types accepted to them as appropriate for use in prestigious public domains such as in schools, universities and in the work place. In fact in Malawi, this is how Chichewa, which adopted the former president's o\\n dialect, attained its status for use in such high domains and as the only language to be studied at university level along with English. The suggestion here is that there is need to make a choice of a viable language or languages. Other varieties will need to be accommodated as each situation demands, to take into account Chick's notion of social justice, but within the chosen variety to be standardised as norms for use in formal contexts.
Incontinuing with the dominance of a single local language as the present ruling elite has done, this has had detrimental effects on the development of other equally viable local languages. One such result is that it has created feelings of tensions among speakers of these different languages, which is contradictory to what the policy stipulates, The worrying implication is the unwitting maintenance of the hegemony of the diglossic
situation in which Chinyanja and English persist for 'high' functions and others 'low'.
This represents the continued promotion of a Nyanja-English elite, thereby still marginalising other language groups in both high domain and low domain functions. In the process other languages remain non-functional beyond tribal bondages whereas they could easily be equally developed. We would suggest therefore that an effective implementation of programmes needs to be devised to improve the current situation.