REPORT ON LANGUAGE MAPPING IN THE REGIONS OF FATICK, KAFFRINE AND KAOLACK LECTURE POUR TOUS Submitted: November 15, 2017 Revised: February 14, 2018 Contract Number: AID-OAA-I-14-00055/AID-685-TO-16-00003 Activity Start and End Date: October 26, 2016 to July 10, 2021 Total Award Amount: $71,097,573.00 Contract Officer’s Representative: Kadiatou Cisse Abbassi Submitted by: Chemonics International Sacre Coeur Pyrotechnie Lot No. 73, Cite Keur Gorgui Tel: 221 78585 66 51 Email: [email protected] Lecture Pour Tous - Report on Language Mapping – February 2018 1 REPORT ON LANGUAGE MAPPING IN THE REGIONS OF FATICK, KAFFRINE AND KAOLACK Contracted under AID-OAA-I-14-00055/AID-685-TO-16-00003 Lecture Pour Tous DISCLAIMER The author’s views expressed in this publicapublicationtion do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States AgenAgencycy for International Development or the United States Government. Lecture Pour Tous - Report on Language Mapping – February 2018 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................................. 5 2. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 12 3. STUDY OVERVIEW ...................................................................................................................... 14 3.1. Context of the study ............................................................................................................. 14 3.2. Objectives of the study ......................................................................................................... 14 4. METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................ 15 4.1. Scope of the study ................................................................................................................. 15 4.2. Data collection ...................................................................................................................... 15 4.3. Presentation of target groups for data collection ................................................................. 19 5. PRESENTATION OF RESULTS .................................................................................................... 21 5.1. What is the national language shared by students in school? ............................................... 21 4.2 Is the common national language used in the schoolyard the same as the most common national language in the local environment? ...................................................................................... 22 4.3 National languages used by teachers in class to facilitate students’ learning in French ........ 25 4.4 What are the language skills of the school's teachers in the national language to be chosen for the school? What other languages do they use and what is their degree of proficiency?.......... 27 4.5 School directors’ skills in national languages ......................................................................... 33 4.6 Which language would the school community like to choose for the teaching of reading? 37 4.7 Triangulation of data sets related to the choice of the language of instruction for the first cohort of program schools ............................................................................................................... 88 5 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ....................................................................... 106 5.1 Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 106 5.2 Recommendations ............................................................................................................... 108 Lecture Pour Tous - Report on Language Mapping – February 2018 3 ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS ACCT Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique ADLAS Association pour le Développement de la Langue Saafi APE/AME Association des Parents/Mères d’Elèves ARED Associaties in Research for Education and Development CNRE Centre National de Ressources Educationnelles DALN Direction de l’Alphabétisation et des Langues Nationales DEE Direction de l’Enseignement Elémentaire DFC Direction de la Formation et de la Communication ELAN Ecole et Langues Nationales EMIL Education Multilingue IA Inspection d’Académie IEF Inspection de l’Education et de la Formation INEADE Institut National d’Etude et d’Action pour le Développement de l’Education IOF International Organization of La Francophonie LOI language of instruction LPT Lecture pour Tous MEL Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning MEN Ministère de l'Education Nationale NGO Non-Governmental Organization PAQUET Programme d’Amélioration de la Qualité de de l’Equité et de la Transparence PDEF Programme de Développement de l’Education et de la Formation UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization USAID United States Agency for International Development WB World Bank Lecture Pour Tous - Report on Language Mapping – February 2018 4 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Context and objectives Several experiences in Senegal and elsewhere have shown that learning in a language that children master well when they start school enables them to understand better and facilitates their knowledge acquisition. Based on this understanding, the Government of Senegal has decided to invest in the teaching of early grade reading through adopting a bilingual approach using national languages, with assistance from USAID through the program Lecture Pour Tous (2016-2021). The Lecture Pour Tous program supports early grade reading instruction in Wolof, Seerer and Pulaar in what will be a total of 6 regions with direct technical and financial assistance and an additional seventh region with technical assistance. For the first cohort of classes that started in the school year 2017/2018, one of the greatest challenges was to choose the appropriate national language of instruction for Grade 1 reading in each of the 1,115 schools covered by the Lecture Pour Tous program in the first year. To obtain information about the languages spoken in school by students and teachers, and to get the community involved in choosing the language of instruction, the program, working closely with the MEN, carried out a language mapping study. The study was conducted in three regions, Kaolack, Kaffrine and Fatick, to determine which of the three national languages to choose for each of the schools in the first cohort who will be included in the program for the 2017/2018 school year. Matam was not visited because the program had not yet launched in this region at the time of the study and we did not yet have authorization to undertake this research there in time for the 2017/2018 school year. For this first exercise, the field research focused only on areas with relative linguistic variety, which covered 427 of the 1115 schools of the first Lecture Pour Tous cohort. According to USAID’s contract for Lecture Pour Tous, the purpose of the mapping exercise was to “determine the languages and the majority language spoken by both teachers and students at the school level in the target regions… [and that] the language of instruction to be used [in schools was to be] decided on a community by community basis by community members” (Senegal All Children Reading contract, Section C.1.3.2). On the other hand, the contract also states that “mapping the ‘language in common’ of students and teachers” should also be used “to enable the MOE to determine the language that should be used for early grade reading instruction in each of its schools” (contract Section C.3.2.1). These mandates raise two critical issues. The first: whether the language in common between student and a given teacher posted at that school at a given point of time should drive the final decision on the national language of instruction (LOI) for a school-community, as opposed to the majority language shared by the early grade students themselves. In the process of trying to make decisions on the LOI for each targeted school this year, most stakeholders were driven by determining the majority language for students. The MEN (at the level of the IEF and school directors) then worked to assign teachers who spoke that majority language to the Grade 1 classrooms for the 2017/2018 school year. Second: the question of who actually makes the final decision – whether the community or the MEN in Lecture Pour Tous - Report on Language Mapping – February 2018 5 some authority (whether in the person of the school director or IEF) – was also a critical issue. This year, the decisions in nearly all cases came down to the MEN. The Lecture Pour Tous program has subsequently flagged this question as a priority policy issue for the coming year, with the goal of helping the MEN decide what will be the information-gathering (mapping) and decision-making process for determining the LOI for early grade reading in time to have clarity on this well in advance of the 2018/2019 school year. The data set gathered through the language mapping exercise adds to two other sources of information used to determine or confirm the national language selected for early grade reading in the first cohort of Lecture Pour Tous schools. The first stems from efforts to determine a) the national languages that would be used for early grade reading instruction as was needed to establish the sampling frame for the baseline early grade