Bilingual Schooling as Educational Development: From Experimentation to Implementation

Bilingual schooling in developing countries is in the process of growing out of its historical roots in scattered missionary efforts, separate-but-unequal mother tongue schooling, and/or ragtag experimentation into better informed and more systematic programs. Positive results and changes in political climate have encouraged both government education ministries and donor agencies to reconsider the importance of instructional language, particularly in primary and basic education programs. This means a new focus on the use of mother tongues, or lingua francae such as creoles or widely spoken indigenous languages, to teach basic literacy and content in a more understandable way. In contrast to submersion in a foreign (ex-colonial) language, which puts at a disadvantage all students who do not have prior access to this language, and further handicaps special groups like ethnolinguistic minorities, rural dwellers and girls and women, bilingual programs are much more accessible and inclusionary. Pedagogically, use of the mother tongue or a strong lingua franca provides the basis for comprehensible content area instruction and literacy skills upon which competence in the second or foreign language can be built. Sociopolitically, use of previously marginalized languages means providing people not only with access to information but also with a stronger sense of identity and self-worth. The same languages and cultures that colonialism made sources of shame become a means for empowerment, with the potential to promote democratic participation and pluralism. The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges and suggest some lessons learned about implementing bilingual programs in the context of educational development, focusing on two countries where the author has worked as a researcher and technical consultant. Both Mozambique and Bolivia are working to implement bilingual programs in an effort to create higher-quality educational systems for all. Mozambique is currently negotiating a critical stage between experimentation and implementation of bilingual schooling, while Bolivia has been involved in a long process of implementation since passing a monumental educational reform law in 1994 that pledges bilingual intercultural education for all. Both countries, along with others whose cases will be discussed briefly in this paper, have experienced a range of successes and failures in the process, from which lessons can be learned.