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English and French bilingual education and language policy in Cameroon: the bottom-up approach or the policy of no policy?

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Abstract

Cameroon, host to around 280 local languages, two European official languages (English and French) and Pidgin English, has been struggling since the 1960s to achieve official bilingualism for national unity and integration. This policy implies that each citizen should learn and use both official languages. The greatest means to implement this language policy has been formal education. However, the failure or mitigated results of the State’s initiatives to produce competent bilingual citizens led to a resurrection and fast dissemination of a defunct education programme launched by the State in 1963 and which consisted of a dual-medium (English and French) and dual-curriculum (British and French curricula) programme offered to a handful of selected Cameroonians. The many obstacles to this atypical and complex programme led the State to stopping the experiment. In 1989, an equivalent programme was launched in two private primary schools and, nowadays, dozens of such schools do the same nationwide without any official recognition. This study examines the State’s tolerance of this very demanding but rapidly spreading programme operating outside the country’s primary education curricula and pedagogical requirements, among other issues, but which seems so attractive to parents. This attractiveness comes from the fact that this dual-medium and dual-curriculum programme enables pupils to become competent bilinguals in English and French. However, because the programme entails extra burdens for parents and pupils, one of the findings this study arrives at is that the same degree of bilingualism could be obtained through a version of the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach.

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Notes

  1. The failure of the official bilingualism promotion policy in education to produce truly bilingual citizens has been underscored by many linguists over decades (Tchoungui 1977; Tiomajou 1991; Kouega 1999, 2005; Fasse 2009, 2010; Takam 2007, 2012).

  2. Submersion is a programme where students are taught in the majority language, irrespective of their first language: ‘Linguistic minority children with a low-status mother tongue are forced to accept instruction through a foreign/official/dominant language’ (Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty 2008: 12).

  3. In a segregation programme, ‘[l]inguistic minority children with a low-status mother tongue are forced to accept instruction through the medium of their mother tongue in classes with minority children with the same mother tongue, where the teacher may be monolingual or bilingual but is often poorly trained, the class/school has poorer facilities and fewer resources than classes/schools for dominant group children, and teaching of the dominant language as a second/foreign language is poor or non-existent. Later integration is not a goal in these programmes’ (Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty 2008: 12).

  4. A majority language, like a minority language, is not always defined by its demo-linguistic weight. Generally, a language is a minority/majority because a language policy defines it as such, explicitly or implicitly. This case applies to countries where the State favours one language (sometimes foreign) to the detriment of local languages which are numerically bigger. Most creolophone countries are in this sociolinguistic situation, like African countries. Creoles, like most African languages, would be looked at as minority languages from the sociolinguistic point of view (even if their speakers are more numerous than those of the officially “majority” language. Batibo (2005) recalls that English, spoken daily by only 3% of the Namibian population, is the majority language of Namibia. The concept of linguistic majority is thus linked to the prestige and official status of the language.

  5. The author underlines.

  6. Governmentality, Foucault’s coinage, is simply defined as the art of government (1991). For this author, governments create laws, including linguistic laws, but are not interested in putting them in practice. He wrote, for example: ‘[W]ith government it is a question, not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved’ (Foucault 1991: 95).

  7. After the defeat of Germans at World War I, Cameroon was partitioned into two territories: the bigger entrusted to France and the smaller one to Britain. After independence respectively in 1960 and 1961, the two independent territories became two federated States. In British Cameroon, the education system was somehow a duplicate of the British one with English being the official and education language while the education system of France was duplicated in French Cameroon with French as official and education language.

  8. The New Education Orientation Law was signed by the President of the Republic in April 1998. In its article 3, it states that the government sets bilingualism (English and French) at all levels of education as a national integration factor. In fact, before this law, second official languages were taught only from class 4 of primary education (8–9 years of age). With the New Orientation Law, children start learning both official languages from nursery schools. And, whereas, second official languages were taught but did not feature among inter class and even end-of-primary education examination papers, with this law, there is a French paper at the FSLC and an English paper at the CEP exams and subsequent ones.

  9. A description of the Man O War Bay project is provided by Wolf (2001: 136) drawing from Fonlon (1969: 38) and Chumbow (1980: 290).

    Each year, an equal number of choice students, from each Federated State, is admitted into the school. In the first, second and third forms, they are taught in separate classes; the Francophones receive intensive courses in English, the Anglophones in French, and do the rest of the subjects in their first language. At the beginning of the fourth form,…the pioneering group was re-arranged into two, graded, bilingual classes in which Francophones and Anglophones sit side by side and receive the same lessons; and, in addition to the continued language effort, some subjects are taught in French, others in English…To test this experiment, it is intended that this pioneering group should take the Brevet (a French secondary school examination taken at the end of the fourth form) and the G.C.E. Ordinary level, at the end of the fifth form. Thereafter, the students can prepare for the Baccalauréat, or the G.C.E Advanced level, or both, as they choose.

  10. Primary education in Cameroon lasts 6 years. In ASE, it goes from Class 1 to Class 6 while in FSE, the 6 classes are distributed thus: SIL, CP, Cours Élementaire 1 (CE1), CE2, Cours Moyen 1 (CM1) and CM2. Class 1 in the ASE corresponds to SIL in the FSE, Class 2 to CP, Class 3 to CE1, Class 4 to CE2, Class 5 to CM1 and Class 6 to CM2. Pupils are generally aged 4–5 years in Class 1/SIL and graduate at 10–11 years.

  11. As shown below, out of the 21 DCBE schools operating in Douala, just eight appear on the results list of the Littoral Regional Delegation for Basic Education. Two main reasons justify this smaller number: (1) the DCBE programme is not recognised by the government. Therefore, not all DCBE schools have their results there with their names because some of them present candidates through other schools, thus making it difficult to trace all their results. (2) In some of those schools, the DCBE programme does not go up to CM2/Class 6 which is normally the level at which pupils sit for CEP/FSLC exams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Modern Languages & Linguistics, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, AB, T1K 3M4, Canada

    Alain Flaubert Takam

  2. Department of English, University of Douala, PO Box 1872, Douala, Cameroon

    Innocent Mbouya Fassé

Authors
  1. Alain Flaubert Takam
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Correspondence to Alain Flaubert Takam.

Appendix: a DCBE school time table—class one

Appendix: a DCBE school time table—class one

Time

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

7:30–8:00

Morning assembly

8:05–8:35

Ecriture

Moral edu.

Copie

Mathematics

Sport

8:35–9:00

Copie

Writing

Tic

Environmental edu.

Controle

9:00–9:30

Lecture

S.W.B

Citizenship

National culture

Sport

9:30–10:00

Recitation

Mathematics

Maths.

Drawing

Controle

10:00–10:30

Snacks

Snacks

Snacks

10:30–11:00

Langage

Computer

Mathematics

English lang.

Controle

11:00–11:30

Conjugaison

English lang.

English lang.

S.W.B

Controle

11:30–12:00

Morale

G. knowledge

Health education

Music

Controle

12:00–13:00

Long break

13:00–13:30

Mathematics

Lecture

 

Lecture

English language

13:30–14:00

English language

Vocabulaire

 

Sciences

Mathematics

14:00–14:30

Citizenship

Conjugaison

 

Mathematics

Writing

14:30–15:00

Literature

Dictee

 

Hygiene

Arts and craft

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Takam, A.F., Fassé, I.M. English and French bilingual education and language policy in Cameroon: the bottom-up approach or the policy of no policy?. Lang Policy 19, 61–86 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-019-09510-7

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