The discussion of African languages as languages of learning and teaching can be traced back to the 1980s. To date, this discussion still continues and efforts to intellectualise African languages have been lax. Here, we present practical South African examples of higher education achievements in African languages that demonstrate the challenges…

This paper discusses the contributions to this special issue in the context of the African Renaissance and the subsequent need to re-define educational development from a multilingual, multicultural and pan-African perspective. Each contribution offers a different angle to the discussion: a critique of Arabization in Morocco, with questions about…

Language policy is an influencing factor of the educational outcome for pupils in Africa. Colonial languages have been largely used and African Languages are neglected. Despite this, the South African Constitution (1996) declares eleven official languages. However, curricular developments favour Afrikaans and English. To analyse the implementation…

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…

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.…

Ghana's language-in-education policy, which mandates the use of L1 as medium of instruction at the lower primary classroom, is not strictly adhered to in majority of Ghanaian classrooms. One factor that has militated against the smooth implementation of the policy is the multilingual nature of Ghana and its classrooms. This sociolinguistic survey,…

In studying language policy, it is not enough to look at central government management, but also at the influence of managers at levels ranging from the family to international organizations. Actual cases reveal that there are also non-linguistic forces such as demography, war, civil strife, and economic breakdowns which have major effects. This…

The University of KwaZulu-Natal has a bilingual language policy (2006) where students may receive instruction in isiZulu as well as in English. An online survey was carried out for all academic and support staff to gauge their linguistic capacity in isiZulu. Staff profiles were created in relation to their respective Colleges, Schools and…

This paper examines the micro planning activities that schools engage in to address learners' needs to make education work in rural primary schools of Botswana. The national language plan prescribes the use of English and Setswana only as languages of instruction at the primary school level. However, this plan is not practical in some regions…

This paper reports on a study that examined the extent to which the development of academic literacy in isiZulu, an indigenous language spoken across all the nine provinces in South Africa, enhances opportunities for epistemological access. The focus is in relation to a pilot study of a Bachelor of Education Honours module that uses isiZulu as the…

From the time of Belgian colonial rule, French was predominantly the medium of instruction (MOI) in Rwanda. Then, in October 2008, a Rwandan Cabinet resolution called for the immediate implementation of English as the language of instruction in all public schools at all levels--from primary to tertiary. This study reports on ethnographic interview…

After the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, 11 languages (English, Afrikaans and 9 indigenous African languages) were given official status. In the higher education landscape, English remains the dominant language of scholarship. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, English is the main medium of instruction but the institution's language…

IsiZulu is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa and has the highest number of speakers in the country. While the South African Language Policy for Higher Education (2002) emphasizes the need to use African languages at universities, not many universities' isiZulu-speaking students prefer to be taught in isiZulu. Research has revealed…

Although a voluminous amount of literature addresses language-in-education policy in Africa, one area in which the literature remains sparse is the role of minority languages in education. This article presents an overview of complex issues regarding the hegemony claims of different minority language groups in Zimbabwe. Given the relatively small…