Teaching and learning interaction in a multilingual African setting
Teaching and learning interactions in an African multilingual setting.
While transnational migration and multilingualism are fairly recent phenomena in Europe, many former colonies have lived more than 100 years with an influx of European elites speaking hegemonic minority languages. In Africa, 60 years after independence, educational systems are still often marked by European languages and ideas of teaching, contrasting with local ways of learning. I investigated interactions in formal and informal learning environments in Cameroon. I used a community of practice perspective along with cognitive linguistics, which strongly anchors meaning to individual experience in actual language use situations. Data come from 16 hours of video recorded during participant observations of village life (6 hours) and ca. 100 hours of classroom observations (10 hours).
In my presentation, the Bakhtinian concept of _speech genres_ (Bakhtin 1986 [1979]) is used to describe linguistic structures that are closely tied to interaction. Speech genres are generalized schemas from repeated usage events in recurring situations to become conventionalized linguistic units (Langacker 2001).
French is the language of instruction in primary school in Cameroon, though many pupils have little knowledge of French. However, new classes growing into communities of practice acquire the communicative repertoire of ‘doing school’ (Wenger 1998). Among the speech genres the students have to learn are answering questions in specific ways, imitating the teacher’s sentences and completing open-ended sentences.
In informal village learning environments, playing games is a way of practising language skills such as appropriate ways of asking a favour. Both games and traditional tales provide the children with a cultural frame of reference (Klapproth 2004).
In the multilingual encounters of Cameroonian children, we see the development of speech genres through participation in communities of practice in and out of school. Such patterns are important tools in all multicultural teaching and learning interactions, and should also be studied in comparative European contexts.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1986 [1979]). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Klapproth, D. M. (2004). Narrative as Social Practice. Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, R. W. (2001). Discourse in Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 12 (2), 143-188.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.
While transnational migration and multilingualism are fairly recent phenomena in Europe, many former colonies have lived more than 100 years with an influx of European elites speaking hegemonic minority languages. In Africa, 60 years after independence, educational systems are still often marked by European languages and ideas of teaching, contrasting with local ways of learning. I investigated interactions in formal and informal learning environments in Cameroon. I used a community of practice perspective along with cognitive linguistics, which strongly anchors meaning to individual experience in actual language use situations. Data come from 16 hours of video recorded during participant observations of village life (6 hours) and ca. 100 hours of classroom observations (10 hours).
In my presentation, the Bakhtinian concept of _speech genres_ (Bakhtin 1986 [1979]) is used to describe linguistic structures that are closely tied to interaction. Speech genres are generalized schemas from repeated usage events in recurring situations to become conventionalized linguistic units (Langacker 2001).
French is the language of instruction in primary school in Cameroon, though many pupils have little knowledge of French. However, new classes growing into communities of practice acquire the communicative repertoire of ‘doing school’ (Wenger 1998). Among the speech genres the students have to learn are answering questions in specific ways, imitating the teacher’s sentences and completing open-ended sentences.
In informal village learning environments, playing games is a way of practising language skills such as appropriate ways of asking a favour. Both games and traditional tales provide the children with a cultural frame of reference (Klapproth 2004).
In the multilingual encounters of Cameroonian children, we see the development of speech genres through participation in communities of practice in and out of school. Such patterns are important tools in all multicultural teaching and learning interactions, and should also be studied in comparative European contexts.
References
Bakhtin, M. (1986 [1979]). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Klapproth, D. M. (2004). Narrative as Social Practice. Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, R. W. (2001). Discourse in Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 12 (2), 143-188.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.
Publisert i Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, 2010
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