ISSUES IN THE NATIONAL AND EDUCATION LANGUAGE POLICIES
7.7 Problems in the language in education policy
public and some authorities who are charged with the responsibility of developing local languages and also the implementation of the revised 1996 language policy in education and in the national life.
In teaching and learning contexts, if learners fail to express cognitively-demanding concepts and their deepest emotions in their indigenous languages, it might become extremely difficult for them to express these feelings in an unfamiliar language. Speakers must have labels for their thoughts, feelings and abstract issues in their mother tongue to be able to trigger them when they speak in English unlike the semilingual condition (Mahlalela-Thusi, 1999:28).
As a result of both the neglect of the development of indigenous languages and the 'straight for English' policy in some private schools in Malawi, semilingualism has evolved considerably. Appel and Muysken (1987) consider this ' a linguistic malaise.' The concept refers to someone who speaks two languages but both at a lower level than monolingual speakers. The danger here is that the majority of learners (see Williams, 1996) end up with learners who have neither proficiency nor competence in either of the languages - their mother tongue and English, as a result of insufficient grounding in the mother tongue first. The argument therefore is to develop the mother tongue to play a complementary role and not a subordinate role to English in both education and in the world outside classroom.
orthography, have no dictionaries, no teachers, no learners' textbooks and other forms ofteaching and learning materials.
• Personnel problems: the lack of native language speakers competent to teach in the same language are two different things altogether. Native speakership alone is not synonymous with expertise (Rampton, 1990).There is the need to have teacher training programmes to specifically cater for the various indigenous languages to be developed. Many teachers are needed as a result of the introduction of free primary school education after 1996.
• Inadequate policy awareness campaigns: a lothasto be done tosensitisethe public on the merits of mother tongue instruction.
• .As a result of the above, many Malawians are confused and regard the policy as detrimental to the acquisition of good English and therefore a good education. To them the two are synonymous. Moreover, people find that the various official environments and opportunities in Malawi call for a knowledge of English rather than that of vernacular languages. They have thus come to question the rationale for developing literacies which are of/ittle economic and political promise. For example, literacy in English is one of the requirements in many employment advertisements.
Social, political and economic gain obtained from one's knowledge of English is remarkably high. Whether English is indeed used throughout such employment in the workplace is another matter.
• Opposition to mother tongue instruction is very common in the print media. This has resulted in an outcry that the 1996 policy will mean the demise of English. The principal secretary of the Ministry of Education clarified the position by saying that Unfortunately people are misinterpreting the policy. English will remain a compulsory subject from standard one to eight.'(The Nation: 1997:08).
Apart from the problems cited above, the development of African languages and the implementation of the language policy as promulgated in 1996, which has not been effected in any classroom, there are other problems such as methodologies. A deficient factor in the language-in-education policy in Malawi is the fact that there is little attempt, if any, to harmonise language policy with wider educational goals which includes developing methods that are chi1d-centred and inquiry-based (Harlech-Jones, 1998). It is difficult to envisage participative, child-centred and inquiry-based education when a considerable number of children who cannot speak Chinyanja are required to read, speak and understand a language that they hardly hear spoken in their environment at home. This is the case with the bulk of learners from typical Yao speaking homes in the south and from the entire northern region. Besides, almost all their teachers neither speak the language nor have expertise to teach effectively through it. Being sent by the government to teach in their respective regions from 1989 has compounded the problem of the teachers' lack of proficiency in the language that appears only in the textbooks available for learning and teaching.
This creates a problem of developing lessons based on communication, when teachers lack proficiency, competence and expertise in the medium of instruction. The ultimate result is that teachers revert to their home languages in content subjects, and not even code-switching is used. They hope this will assist their learners to understand both concepts and content. This isindefiance to what the policy stipulates.
Apart from the above problems, cited from Kamwendo (1997), Awoniyi (1982:58) has classified problems of teaching African languages thus:
• lack of secondary school teachers, especially well-trained graduates;
• little enthusiasminthe study of African languages by students because of thestatusof and emphasis on English in most anglophone African states;
• inadequate evaluation and testing techniques, and
• finally 'the most significant reason why the teaching of African languages is so inadequate is because of the defects of the curriculum.'
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.