Multilingual Writing Pedagogy for African Languages in the Monolingual Education Setting: Literacy Development for Multilingual Children in Rwanda (Grades 1-3)
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Multilingual writing pedagogy for African languages in the monolingual education setting: Literacy development for multilingual children in Rwanda (grades 1-3) By AMINI NGABONZIZA Jean de Dieu Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Linguistics Programme of the School of Arts, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. Supervisor: Professor Heike Tappe June, 2020 Declaration of Plagiarism I, AMINI NGABONZIZA Jean de Dieu, declare that 1. The research reported in this thesis, except where otherwise indicated, is my original research. 2. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 3. This thesis does not contain other persons‘ data, pictures, graphs or other information, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other persons. 4. This thesis does not contain other persons‘ writing, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other researchers. Where other written sources have been quoted, then: a. Their words have been re-written but the general information attributed to them has been referenced b. Where their exact words have been used, then their writing has been placed in italics and inside quotation marks, and referenced. 5. This thesis does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet, unless specifically acknowledged, and the source being detailed in the thesis and in the References sections. Signed ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to 1. My late father Gakuba Faustin who would be proud to see his son‘s dreams come true; 2. Professor Dr. RWIGAMBA Balinda who inspired me to follow a linguistics and humanities research journey. iii Acknowledgements I thank Rugira, the Almighty, for his blessing upon me, my family and my nation. He raised us from statelessness, led us to our mother country and rebirthed us as a united nation that can dream and achieve big things. May glory be given to him forever and ever! This thesis cannot be credited solely to me. I wish to take into account many people and families who helped to shape my understanding of the question under examination in this thesis. I wish to express my gratitude to them for their ongoing direction, support and encouragement. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the following persons for their help and support during the period of my study for this thesis: First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Heike Tappe for her excellent and professional supervision, her insightful comments and valuable suggestions on this thesis. I would like to thank Professor Heike for her kindness, humanity, patience and understanding of my situation of working in a difficult environment with limited financial resources. You have marked my thought on thinking always on what makes us human! Secondly, I would like to thank Prof. Rosendal Tove for providing me with advice and references, including her own PhD thesis. Her supporting words and works have played an important role in my completing this thesis, especially in the last months. My special thanks go to Mrs Shirley Gamedze for proofreading my draft chapters and providing alternative wording, as well as for her strong sense of humanity ―Ubuntu‖ (I am because you are) that encouraged me to pursue my academic dream. My special thanks go to Mrs BEVIS, Aileen who proofread the final draft of my thesis with unwavering patience and great diligence. I am forever indebted to her for correcting my mistakes and hunting down inconsistencies. I learnt so much from these corrections of style and language. All remaining errors are mine. iv I would like to thank all the academicians who helped me in one way or another, especially Dr. Sibomana, Dr. Niyibizi, Dr Claudine, the family of Dr. James and Claudine, Dr. Ngoboka and lecturers of the University of Kibungo (UNIK). Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family in Rwanda, especially the Ngabonzizas, for their love, patience and understanding of my choice to be a man of letters and not only of cows (a cow is a symbol of wealth and nobility in my country). I owe thanks to my beloved wife KANKESHA NGABONZIZA Delphine for your lovely understanding when I was busy during fieldwork and stuck writing this thesis. To our twin daughters KIRENGAYAMWIZA NGABONZIZA Joan and JURUYAMWIZA NGABONZIZA Joany who are teaching us what is most important in human life! May they grow to find their place in the kingdom of God! Through your kindness, I am learning to be a better person! v Abstract This study investigates multilingual literacy practices in Rwanda. It first assesses selected writings produced by young children whose L1 is Oluchiga while learning writing skills in Kinyarwanda (L2) in Grade 1 to Grade 3. This assessment of writing specimens aimed at identifying morphosyntactic intrusion from the L1 to the L2. Secondly, the study examined the local teachers‘ literacy pedagogy practices while teaching writing in Kinyarwanda to native speakers of Oluchiga in lower primary (Grades 1-3). This consisted of the analysis of teaching practices and attitudes towards L2 and L1. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and a corpus of the learners‘ writing. The data collection and analysis was informed by the mixed method of combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative data collection consisted of compiling a corpus of 109 texts of learners‘ past writing exercises. This helped to determine the L1 influence on L2 writing through morphosyntactic analysis. The qualitative data were collected using both semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with grades 1-3 learners and their literacy teachers to understand their attitudes towards Oluchiga (L1) and Kinyarwanda (L2). The interviews with teachers helped also to explore the teachers‘ own views on how they use literacy pedagogy strategies to cope with the disparity between the multilingual realities on the ground and the monolingual educational policy in Rwanda (grades 1 to 3). The findings of this study show that local literacy teachers adopted multilingual approaches to teaching writing in Kinyarwanda (L2) to learners speaking Oluchiga (L1), regardless of the national policy of a monolingual teaching approach. The findings of this study are twofold: on the one hand, the results of the theoretical linguistic findings revealed the types of transfer errors from L1 to L2 and consequently the L1 influence on the L2, both negative and positive. The types of transfer errors identified in this study are (1) concordial agreement errors (affixes, noun class markers, adjectives and demonstrative markers); (2) errors in the agglutinative structure of words (augment and phonological transfer errors); and vi (3) lexical transfer errors. The analysis of the findings revealed the influence of the L1 on L2 writing in terms of concordial agreement of sentences and agglutinative structure of words. The concordial agreement patterns are violations of the subject-verb-object agreement and transfer errors of tense markers (affixes determining future and present tense). It was found that learners, by retaining L1 structure (in some instances) and by substitution of consonants /k/ for /c/ and /s/ for /ʃ/, violated the Kinyarwanda agglutinative structure of words as a result of L1 influence on L2. These results were discussed in the light of cross-linguistic influence and supported the prediction of the Typological Primacy Model (TPM). The results of this study showed positive and negative transfer errors as predicted by TPM. The occurrence of negative and positive transfer was explained as the result of the linguistic closeness of L1 and L2 (in this study, similar morphosyntactic or lexical structures between L1 and L2). The findings of this study do not support the CEM prediction that there are only positive transfer errors from L1 to L2. The findings on the influence of Oluchiga (L1) on Kinyarwanda writing (L2) were discussed in terms of the possibility that language acquisition is not cumulative as predicted by CEM. It is possible that languages in contact are in continuum and influence each other during learning and actual communication. This was also argued in the applied linguistics findings of this study. On the other hand, the applied linguistics findings showed that local literacy teachers explored the influence of L1 on L2 writing as a language teaching approach that bridges the transition between home language and school language. That approach was termed the multilingual proximity teaching method in this study and it consists of teaching L2 by explaining to learners the similarities and differences between L1 and L2. This approach was argued to be multilingual because it allows the use of two languages in the classroom. In addition, the local literacy teachers who were observed reported using translanguaging approaches such as multimodality, even though they reported that they are not confident that they are doing the right thing. The study concludes with advocacy for multilingualism in education in Rwanda. vii List of figures Figure 1: Rwanda and its surrounding countries......................................................................................... 14 Figure 2: Linguistic map of Rwanda in 1984 ............................................................................................. 25 Figure 3: Arboreal metaphor from Canagarajah (2018: 3) ......................................................................