Good Morning, Grade One. Language ideologies and multilingualism within primary education in rural Zambia.
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Date
02/07/2015Author
Cole, Alastair Charles
Metadata
Abstract
This practice based PhD project investigates the language ideologies which surround the
specific multilingual context of rural primary education in Zambia. The project
comprises of a creative documentary film and a complementary written submission. The
fieldwork and filming of the project took place over 12 months between September 2011
and August 2012 in the community of Lwimba, in Chongwe District, Zambia.
The project focuses on the experiences of a single grade one class, their teacher, and the
surrounding community of Lwimba. The majority of the school children speak the
community language of Soli. The regional lingua franca, and language of the teacher,
however, is Nyanja, and the students must also learn Zambia’s only official language,
English. At the centre of the project is a research inquiry focusing on the language
ideologies which surround each of these languages, both within the classroom and the
wider rural community. The project also simultaneously aims to investigate and reflect
on the capacity of creative documentary film to engage with linguistic anthropological
research.
The film at the centre of the project presents a portrait of Annie, a young, urban teacher
of the community’s grade one class, as well as three students and their families. Through
the narrativised experiences of the teacher and children, it aims to highlight the linguistic
ideologies present within the language events and practices in and around the classroom,
as well as calling attention to their intersection with themes of linguistic modernity,
multilingualism, and language capital. The project’s written submission is separated into
three major chapters separated into the themes of narrative, value and text respectively.
Each chapter will focus on subjects related to both the research inquiry and the project’s
documentary film methodology. Chapter one outlines the intersection of political-historical
narratives of nationhood and language that surround the project, and reflects on
the practice of internal narrative construction within documentary film. Chapter two
firstly focuses on the language valuations within the institutional setting of the classroom
and the wider community, and secondly proposes a two-phase perspective of evaluation
and value creation as a means to examine the practice of editing within documentary film
making. Chapter three addresses the theme of text through discussing the role of literacy
acquisition and use in the classroom and community, as well as analysing and reflecting
on the practice of translation and subtitle creation within the project.