Recognizing that children's learning outcomes generally remain low, in its recent 2017--2021 Education and Skills Sector Plan (ESSP) the Government of Zambia prioritized improving learning outcomes through strategies that addressed gaps in education system quality, access, equity and efficiency. What resources and contextual factors are associated…

The sociolinguistic repertoires of individuals in Sudan are products of institutionalised orders of normalisation. The visibility of language in popular and official discourses in Sudan is always linked with wider cultural and political projects. This paper intends to engage with and explicate this observation by, first, examining how the dominant…

One African-centered linguistic paradigm argues the primary language of most descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is not English but an African language. The language is called "Ebonics." Clinical linguist Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (1938-) is the most conspicuous figure in the history of the paradigm. The reconstructed…

Despite the fact that comprehension plays an important role in the reading process, the literature in a South African context reveals that learners continue to struggle with it and teachers continue to neglect it in their teaching. The literature has further shown that teachers' neglect of comprehension in their reading lessons could be attributed…

This paper undertakes a sociolinguistic analysis of slangy expressions in Nigerian Pidgin. The corpus for this study was gotten systematically through participant observation of conversational discourses in everyday contexts amongst Nigerians living in the Warri-Ughelli-Sapele axes of Delta State. These linguistic data were then recorded and…

Portuguese is the mother tongue for many Angolans yet a majority continue to use African languages in everyday interactions and schools struggle to provide equal educational opportunities for students whose first language is not Portuguese. Recognizing this challenge, the Angolan government has created a language policy that will introduce six…

Literacy is a powerful tool against poverty, leading to further education and vocational success. In sub-Saharan Africa, schoolchildren commonly learn in two languages--African and European. Multiple early literacy skills (including phonological awareness and receptive language) support literacy acquisition, but this has yet to be empirically…

South Africa's history of segregation and the privileging of English and Afrikaans as the only languages of teaching and learning beyond primary schooling, make the post-apartheid period a complex one, especially in light of the Constitutional commitment to multilingualism in the 11 official languages. Research on literacy and language teaching…

Owing to its economic growth and social changes in the past two decades, China has become a popular destination for tourists, investors, and diverse communities of migrants. When foreign-language-speaking migrants interact with Chinese criminal justice system, they rely on interpreters to participate in the proceedings. Based on four-month trial…

This article engages postcolonial debate on citizenship education's power-knowledge nexus by interrogating the concerns of 37 secondary schoolteachers in a Western Cape Xhosa township, the first created during the apartheid era. Unmasking power-knowledge divides in the localisation of global norms, the data reveal state dismissal of indigenous…

Increasing international mobility has raised awareness on the fluidity and porous nature of boundaries not only between nation states, but also between named languages. Despite the complexities of overlaps across a wider spectrum of languages and classrooms worldwide, orthodox education programmes still reflect monolingual and epistemic biases,…

Background: Social and economic aspirations held by parents can reflect a desire for their children to learn English as a second language. Bilingual education has the potential for empowering traditionally disadvantaged groups, particularly through competence in English, a language that positions identity with power, privilege and status, thus…

In this paper, we investigate the choice of English as a home language in Ghana, a multilingual nation where 81 languages are spoken by a population of about 27 million people. In the past, while English was reserved as the de facto language of official domains, e.g., government business and education, Ghanaian languages were used in informal…

This paper explores, at the micro level, the sociolinguistic backgrounds of teacher trainees in a College of Education in Accra and their perceptions toward Ghana's current language-in-education policy. It aims at finding how these micro-level sociolinguistic insights could provide suggestions for language-in-education policies at the macro level.…

This report describes ongoing research on reading in African languages. It draws mainly on contributions from two British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) "Language in Africa" (LiA) Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings: the LiA SIG strand at BAAL 2013 and the seminar on "Reading Methodologies in African Languages"…