The Effect of the Language of Test on Students' Academic Achievement In
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Succes or failure? The effect of the language of test on students’ academic achievement in rural Senegal Alexandre Martín-Chazeaud Aquesta tesi doctoral està subjecta a la llicència Reconeixement 3.0. Espanya de Creative Commons. Esta tesis doctoral está sujeta a la licencia Reconocimiento 3.0. España de Creative Commons. This doctoral thesis is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Spain License. SUCCESS OR FAILURE? THE EFFECT OF THE LANGUAGE OF TESTS ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN RURAL SENEGAL Tesi doctoral presentada per Alexandre Martín-Chazeaud Com a requeriment per a l’obtenció del títol de Doctor per la Universitat de Barcelona Programa de doctorat: Estudis Lingüístics, Literaris i Culturals Línia de recerca: Lingüística Aplicada Departament de Llengües i Literatures Modernes i d’Estudis Anglesos Directora: M. Luz Celaya Villanueva Universitat de Barcelona 2017 To all African children, with the purpose of breaking up the silence of their voices ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Celaya, who guided me and encouraged me throughout the hard process of the present dissertation. All the valuable advice, persistent support and positive encouragement that she could give me were essential in order to carry out research in Sub-Saharan Africa and write this thesis. I am particularly indebted to Dr Jarvis and all the members of the committee of the Language Learning Dissertation Grant Programme at Language Learning from whom I had the pleasure to be granted with support during the collection of data in Senegal. I would like to thank Dr Cummins, Dr Brock-Utne and Dr Skattum for their recommendations on some references which have been of inspiration to the present dissertation. My gratitude to all the staff members of the Master in Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts at the University of Barcelona for all I learnt from them. A special thankfulness addressed to Mr Joseph Thiaw, a close friend, for his precious help despite the difficult circumstances in rural Senegal. He collaborated in the translation of the tests into Sérère, read the tests to participants in the experimental group and he was indispensable when questionnaires were given to parents, since most of them could not communicate in French. I am also in debt with Mr Alioune Faye. He devoted his time and his experience for the translation of all the tests to Sérère. I would also like to thank Mr Martín for his advice in the design of the Mathematics tests. His expertise in the pedagogy of this subject was of great value in the final version of each problem-solving-task. Also, together with Mr Planes, they offered their knowledge on statistics which helped in the inferential analysis of the data. My deepest gratitude to Mrs Clara Forn and all the management team at the Institut Pere Calders. They have given me the chance to travel to Senegal and collect information. I wish to acknowledge the participation of students, teachers and families at Keur Madiabou, Keur Guirène Sérère, Ndjigane Sérère, Sekhela Diarga, Badoudou and neighbouring villages. I am particularly grateful to directors who allowed me to collect data among the students of their schools. I would also like to extend my thanks to Mr Tine who helped me in the search of information at the library of the Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar and put me in contact with linguists there. I also owe my appreciation to my family and friends who have always granted me their support all along the writing of thesis when hard moments appeared. My especial thankfulness to my parents and my sister for their patience and their understanding of those periods when I was pressed to meet deadlines. Finally, my most sincere recognition is for all those children whom I have met during my different sojourns in Senegal. Their enthusiasm towards life and their tenacious smile despite harsh circumstances have granted me the motivation required in order to accomplish the present dissertation. SUMMARY In most Sub-Saharan countries, children grow up in a local environment attached to a culture and an identity which are embraced by a local language. However, when they start compulsory school at the age of six, they have to face a curriculum which is taught and assessed from the first year in a European language foreign to them and, in most cases, culturally far from their own reality. According to Heugh (2006; 2011b), these children must face a language barrier in monolingual educational systems in which a second language (L2) is the unique medium of instruction and where their mother tongue (L1) has no place. In such circumstances, learners are deprived from access to an education of quality and, consequently, obtain low results in tests, a fact depicted by Skutnabb-Kangas (2009a: 1) as a “genocide and a crime against humanity”. As a result of school failure and grade repetition, young students feel demotivated and families encourage their children to drop out formal education in order to participate in the economy of the family or in the household at very young ages (Magga, Nicolaisen, Task, Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar, 2005; Brock-Utne, 2014). In other words, those educational systems which do not consider the learners’ L1 as a medium of instruction do not represent any longer the means by which knowledge and language are taught for future and personal growth, but instead, the means which generates a vicious circle of failure and socio-linguistic indifference, including poverty and social exclusion (Mohanty, 2009). This fact is of special interest to the female population living in rural areas of Sub-Saharan countries. Benson (2001a; 2001b) argues that females are considered academically incompetent as compared to males because they obtain low scores in tests and show an inactive presence during lectures, not only due to the fact that they scarcely understand lessons, but also to their hard responsibilities within the household. Benson (2005a) proposes that instruction through the mother tongue can have positive effects on females’ scores at school, a fact which leads to motivation and active participation in the learning process. Therefore, in such contexts, tests are designed in a European language when only 5% to 10% of the population, generally the high socio-economic class, is proficient in it (Brock-Utne and Alidou, 2006). According to Shohamy (2006) this circumstance creates an unfair situation known by the researcher as the power of tests in which only those students who master the official language can succeed at school. With the purpose of analysing students’ academic achievement depending on the language in which they take tests, the present study was carried out in rural Senegal. It gathered data from 149 participants (66 males and 83 females) who attended grade 3 or grade 6. They were given two types of tests: Six multiple-choice questions of social and natural sciences and three mathematical problem-solving tasks, with a different degree of language complexity and context familiarity. Participants were divided into an experimental group if they were given the tests in their mother tongue (L1 Sérère) and a control group, if they received the tests in the official language of formal education (L2 French). As revealed by the results obtained, L1 Sérère as language of tests benefitted students at both the quantity and the quality of their outcomes, and this was specially true for females. Moreover, the present study gave further evidence to Cummins’ theories Interdependence and Threshold Hypotheses and supported Heugh (2011b), Benson (2013) and Brock-Utne’s (2016) idea that school curricula in developing countries should consider the students’ L1 as medium of instruction and language of tests at school, at least during six years, with the purpose of developing linguistic and academic skills in the L1 for later transferring them to the European language as L2. SUMARI En la majoria de països de l’Àfrica Subsahariana, els infants creixen en un entorn lligat a una identitat i una cultura unides per una llengua. No obstant, quan comencen l’educació obligatòria a l’edat de sis anys, han de fer front a un currículum acadèmic impartit i avaluat en una llengua europea estrangera i, en molts casos, culturalment distant de la seva realitat. Segons Heugh (2006; 2011b), aquests infants han d’enfrontar-se a una barrera lingüística en un sistema educatiu monolingüe on una segona llengua (L2) es l’únic mitjà d’instrucció i on la seva llengua materna (L1) no hi té lloc. En aquestes circumstàncies, als aprenents se’ls priva d’accés a una educació de qualitat i, consegüentment, obtenen notes baixes en els tests, un fet descrit per en Skutnabb- Kangas (2009a: 1) com un “genocidi i crim contra la humanitat”. Com a resultat del fracàs escolar i la repetició, els joves alumnes se senten desmotivats i les famílies els animen a abandonar l’educació formal per participar en l’economia familiar i en les obligacions de la llar a partir d’edats molt joves (Magga, Nicolaisen, Task, Skutnabb- Kangas i Dunbar, 2005; Brock-Utne, 2014). Dit d’una altra manera, aquells sistemes educatius que no consideren la L1 dels alumnes com a mitjà d’instrucció ja no representen els mitjans a través dels quals els coneixements i les llengües s’ensenyen per un futur creixement personal, però en el seu lloc, són els mitjans que generen un cercle viciós de fracàs escolar i indiferència sociolingüística, incloent-hi pobresa i exclusió social (Mohanty, 2009). Aquest fet és d’especial interès en el cas de la població femenina que viu en zones rurals de l’Àfrica subsahariana. Benson (2001a; 2001b) argumenta que a les noies se les considera acadèmicament incompetents perquè obtenen notes baixes als tests i mostren una presència inactiva durant les classes, no només pel fet què amb prou feines entenen la lliçó, sinó també degut a les seves responsabilitats a la llar.