Language Use and Mode of Communication In
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LANGUAGE USE AND MODE OF COMMUNICATION IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN NYANZA PROVINCE, KENYA OMONDI OKETCH A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR PHILOSOPHIAE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE. SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR FELIX BANDA MAY 2006 Language Use and Mode of Communication in Community Development Projects in Nyanza Province, Kenya Omondi Oketch KEY WORDS Communication Language Development Community Mode Project Third World Social Interaction Multimodality Visual semiotics ii ABSTRACT Language Use and Mode of Communication in Community Development Projects in Nyanza Province, Kenya Omondi Oketch PhD Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape The concept of community development is founded on the premise that changes in the living conditions of people are best effected by the people themselves. The term community evokes the idea of a homogeneous social group who can recognise their common interests and work together harmoniously for their common good. The concerns of the leading development agents and donors in the past two decades have been on empowering communities to participate in their own development by taking control of decisions and initiatives that seek to improve their living conditions. The zeal to address these concerns has in the past decade been pushed with such resounding statements that people’s participation in development projects has not only been seen as a basic human right, but also as an imperative condition for human survival. It has been strongly argued in the UNDP reports that the overall development strategy is to enable people to gain access to a much broader range of opportunities. From this perspective, development as a social activity seeks to ensconce economic liberalisation, freedom of association, good governance and access to free market economy as the guiding tenets of an improved life in all communities in the world. The realization of this dream posed a major challenge to many governments in the Third World and the 1980s saw the emergence of ‘associational revolution’ – the proliferation of small-scale non governmental organizations (NGOs) with relative autonomy from the state. The mainstream development agencies perceived the NGOs as the best instruments to instigate changes in the living conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged people. For this reason, NGOs became increasingly instrumental in implementing development objectives in the rural and iii disadvantaged communities. Development in this sense consists of processes in which various groups are stimulated to improve aspects of their lives particularly by people from outside their community. This has drawn attention to how these outsider- development agents communicate development information particularly due to the sociolinguistic situation in many rural African communities. The real concern is with is that the target majority of the people in the rural areas are not speakers of the dominant languages of the development discourse, in most cases this is the official foreign languages taught in schools. Communication is a fundamental part in community development programmes and language emerges as a key factor in effective communication and implementation of these programmes. While it is evident that social interactions are sustained by agreeable communicative principles, the role of language and the different mode of communication applied to development interventions have received very little attention from the parties concerned. This has yielded detrimental repercussions in the quality of interaction at the grassroots level. More often than not, it is assumed that once there is a common language, effective communication will take place and for this reason language use and mode of communication are never given much thought in the field of development interaction. This is a linguistic study of the social interaction in development interventions in Nyanza Province in Kenya. The study examines language use and mode of communication in disseminating development messages in the communities in the province. This thesis argues that the province has not achieved development dreams set by the many NGOs working in the area due to inattention to language use and communication modes. In order to understand the poverty situation in the province, particularly as reported in the Kenya government poverty reports in the last four years and the UNDP report 2005, this study investigated the interactive process between the change agents and the communities they target to change. Arguing from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theoretical position, this thesis seeks to explain how the opaque and transparent structural relationships of dominance, iv discrimination, power and control are constituted, expressed and legitimized in the discourse practices as observed in the interactions between development agents and the target communities. The thesis also applies the tenets of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) particularly the notion of metafunctions (Experiential, Interpersonal and Textual) to analyse clauses and multimodal texts used by development interactants in the study area. In this way, the thesis explores the how discourse choices, mode of communication, power and ideology impact on meaning making and dissemination of development information. To be able to investigate language use and mode of communication comprehensively, the study embarked on a thorough examination of development projects’ objectives, languages used in development interaction and the modes of communication applied in disseminating development information. This study is therefore situated within the qualitative paradigm and uses qualitative methods of data collection, namely Questionnaires, Key Informant Interviews Focus Group Discussions, Document Analysis and participant Observation, to gather data that is used to advance the arguments in this thesis. While recognizing the fecundity of these tools in exhaustive data collection, the study also used them to triangulate the data gathered thus verifying the data and ensuring reliability and validity. The data is analyzed qualitatively using an analytical framework developed from two linguistic theories, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis reveal that the three modes of communication (the phonic, the graphic and the multimodal) commonly used in development communication in the study area are not common to the target community. More often than not the modes are not sensitive to the cultural and situational contexts of the interaction, thus ignoring the communities’ schemata, concerns and preferences. This results into disorder of discourse, which in turn hampers interactive community participation that is deemed critical to community development. Furthermore, the language preferences of the change agents construct development as an elite exercise, thereby stereotyping development as something foreign disseminated by v elites mostly through elitist language (English) and modes of communication. The results reveal that many development projects fail because they are not rooted in the socio-cultural contexts of the communities they seek to serve. The thesis also concludes that language is a powerful capital that is used to construct and construe reality hence influencing change in social structures and human relationships. This revelation dispels the notion held by many people that language is transparent and has no significant place in development. Language reflects social status and the power imbalances among participants involved in development interaction and this impact on the way development messages are disseminated and interpreted. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that the language and mode of communication used in development initiatives in the study area, do not aid effective communication and common understanding of development objectives. In some cases the language choice and mode of communication are completely inaccessible/inappropriate to the target group, thus making the projects an end in themselves and an opportunity for the powerful agents of change to manipulate and control the people in the rural communities. In this regard, development projects are not benefiting the target communities and this could explain why the province is ranked among the poorest in Kenya. Finally, based on the best practices observed from the field and the analysis of some of the communication models used, this study suggests a communication model that can be used to enhance communication in community development interactions. This model recognises the dialectical relation between texts and the socio-cultural contexts that produce them and incorporates all the modes of communication. It is my take that once participants are aware of these features of contexts and how they are manifested in texts, they will be able to select the correct modes of communication and improve their interaction in development projects. vi DECLARATION I declare that Language Use and Modes of Communication in Community Development in Nyanza Province, Kenya is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other University, and that all sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. Signed .................................... Omondi Oketch Supervisor .............................................................. Professor Felix Banda May 2006