The Bumpy Road to Mother Tongue Instruction in Malawi1

Abstract

In 1996, the Ministry of Education in Malawi directed that in future Standards 1 to 4 would be taught through mother tongues. It took eight years before the pilot phase of the language policy could begin. The paper critically analyses this situation using Bamgbose's framework which says that, in Africa, language policies tend to follow one or more of the following patterns: avoidance, vagueness, arbitrariness, fluctuation, and declaration without implementation. The paper explains why the implementation of Malawi's mother tongue instruction policy has been a slow journey on a bumpy road.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.