An indigenous or community language is the language that nurtures the child in the early years of his or her life. The UNESCO land mark publication in 1953 underscores the importance of educating children in their community languages: an education that is packaged in a language which the child does not understand is simply difficult for the child.…

The language in education policy in Kenya recommends mother tongue education in primary school learning. The purpose of this study was to explore the development of mother tongues as academic languages at the lower primary section in which the languages are supposed to be used. The exploration was on the functions they play in classroom…

Despite setting high hopes on education, very few pastoral nomad children in Kenya transition from primary education to secondary education. This article argues that the national Kenyan compulsory formal curriculum fails to accommodate the needs of pastoralist communities. Literacy rates are particularly low among the Turkana people, pastoralist…

When teaching multilingual learners, it is critical for teachers to use instructional strategies that engage and nurture language and biliteracy skills. In this practice-based paper, we address how teachers can utilize translanguaging strategies to recognize and build multilingual practices while offering all learners opportunities to share their…

While there are many factors involved in delivering quality basic education, language is clearly the key to communication and understanding in the classroom. It is also a linguistic and societal reality that many developing countries are characterised by individual as well as societal multilingualism, yet a majority of multilingual societies in…

Research in sub-Saharan Africa investigating the effect of mother tongue (MT) literacy instruction at medium scale is limited. A randomized controlled trial of MT literacy instruction was implemented in 2013 and 2014 as part of the Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative in Kenya. We compare the effect of two treatment groups--the base PRIMR…

The present study explored the role of vocabulary and decoding skills in predicting reading comprehension, utilizing data from 322 first- grade children from four elementary schools in Kenya. The children were administered a comprehensive battery of tests to assess pseudo-word reading skills, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and…

While there is growing attention to language as a central issue in education for refugees, this policy area still appears to be dominated by an apolitical, technical, and instrumentalist perspective. Through a comparison of language-in-education policies in two refugee camp contexts, Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and the refugee camps along the…

Research shows that modern forms of colonization are vested with globalizing discourses which include early childhood education, gender, and curriculum policies and practices that are Euro-western based. In this collaborative qualitative study, four ethnographic researchers--two who conduct research in Nepal and two who conduct research in…

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…

Despite advances in multilingual education (MLE) scholarship, education in most African societies remain characteristically congruent with colonial normative monolingual and transitional multilingual policies, which limit the use of native language(s) as media of instruction to early primary schooling. This contributes to poor educational and…

This qualitative study sought to prompt a critical and reflective discourse on the dismal use of mother tongue in Kenyan early childhood education (ECE) institutions in an attempt to detect existence of xenocentrism. Although the Kenyan ECE policy framework sanctions use of the language of the catchment area when teaching and communicating with…

Reading research has shown that variable relationships exist between measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, depending on whether the language of the text is the reader's first language or an additional language. This paper explores this phenomenon, using reading assessment data for 2,000 Kenyan children in two or three…

Bilingualism characterizes people in linguistically heterogeneous settlements like Nairobi among other urban centres in Kenya. But the country is also predominantly rural (where you find people of a common language settled in one geographical rural region) in which mother tongues are primary means of communication. Children in lower primary in…

Many successful piloted programs fail when scaled up to a national level. In Kenya, which has a long history of particularly ineffective implementation after successful pilot programs, the Tusome national literacy program--which receives funding from the United States Agency for International Development--is a national-level scale-up of previous…