I really should have done this ages ago.... Just reread the intro for this conference and found we were free to enter topics... Oh well, an Africa topic is here now. As I am gearing up to leave for Mali in six weeks or so my thoughts are rapidly turning to the schools I will be visiting there. Now I have this topic I'll send Marcia school related items from Mali to post in here for anyone who is interested.

Marcia, you'd better look at this ...

I amloking. Do not know enough to say anything. You are returning to educate the educators, are you not?

No, I would not presume to do that ... I am working alongside them, documenting what I see to help with evaluation. I am going as a learner .... to learn from them. Inmy possible future long term assignment I may be able to share some of my areas of expertise, but I need to do a lot of learning first.

Will you be communicating in English mainly? Or a local language?

I know you are a linguist, as is your husband...

My Malian co-researcher speaks English, French and Bambara. We communicate together in English and he translates for us. We can manage to get around in French, and I can follow conversations, but am not very confident in speaking. Bambara, the language used in the capital Bamako, is very similar to Mandinka, the language we learnt in The Gambia. However, the similarity is more like English and French!!!! We did one month's Bambara language learning last time, and will continue again this time. I feel quite embarassed by my lack of proficiency... The classes we will be observing will be using Bambara and/or French. Although in one school all the children come from Malinke speaking families. Malinke is VERY similar to Mandinka, and I can communicate in that at a basic level. However, Malinke is not used in class..... In the experimental system I am researching the kids start in Bambara ( or whatever the local language is - 13 out of 32 have been chosen as languages for education). They are taught French as a foreign language in year 2 and start writing it in year 3. By years 5 and 6 they should be using French in most classes. At the end of year 6 they take the same leaving exam that the kids who started in French take.

I am so impressed and sepressed at the same time. Like most Americans, I am fluent in only one language, though I do know an American who speaks 39 and counting. in Hawaii, children never learn any language properly and let the creole pidgin of the streets suffice. I can speak that!

Creoles and Pidgins are now becoming recognised as languages in their own right in many countries after being disparaged for centuries. Obviously there are varying degrees both of proficiency and of the development of pidgin languages. There is a continuum along which this development travels from a functional pidgin language which is used merely for trade/communication between languages and which is truncated in it's vocabulary, to a full blown Creole which is as rich and diverse as any language. The test usually is whether a language (whatever it is called...pidgin or creole) is the mother tongue of any of its speakers. If the kids really are only speaking pidgin then the language is becoming creolised and developing.

Here's an innovative project bringing soar powered multimedia computers to Mozambique classrooms. http://www.learningforall.org/projectintro.shtml