Literacy in Senegal; languages unmentioned

I first got interested in African languages after my experience working in the field in Togo, where so much happened around me in languages that I never mastered beyond greetings and a few phrases. Later in Mali and Guinea, I made special efforts to learn their languages for working and living on community levels. This experience and subsequent research and observation have convinced me of the importance of African languages in development work (even for foreigners and outside-funded projects), and attuned me to how language is and is not mentioned in various discussions and descriptions of development work in Africa.

Source: EDC, "Youth Volunteers Can Contribute to Significant Reading
Gains: Evidence from the HYVALL project in Senegal," March 2015

So it was with interest that I looked at some articles on the "Harnessing Youth Volunteers as Literacy Leaders" (HYVALL) project in Senegal, which is funded by USAID under its All Children Reading Grand Challenge program, and implemented by YMCA Senegal with the US non-governmental organization, Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC). I found it striking that one, and another, and then another article about this literacy effort made no mention at all of the language or languages used.

Only when listening to a YouTube video by two members of  YMCA Senegal could one learn that the students were discussing French lessons in "mother tongues" (French being the medium of instruction). But those languages for some reason were not named (presumably Wolof, the most spoken language in Senegal, is one of them).

This is an interesting approach, making more formal outside of school and via peer tutoring the informal practice sometimes seen in African classrooms of the teacher explaining aspects of a lesson formally given in the Europhone language of instruction in the students' first language. However it also raises the question whether HYVALL makes any effort to expand students' literacy skills in their first language, and towards achieving "pluriliteracy" - or "multilingual literacy" in all their spoken languages.

I've discussed pluriliteracy in African Languages in a Digital Age (pp. 40-41), as well as in a blog posting last year. Puriliteracy may not be the explicit goal of education or literacy efforts in Africa, although mother-tongue based/multilingual education may imply that outcome to a degree, and literacy in different languages or scripts is rarely if ever discussed in statistics. However it would seem to merit prioritization by programs such as All Children Reading.

As much as mention of languages, and African languages in particular, might be omitted from communication about foreign-funded literacy projects, African languages seem often to be absent from the design and content of the projects themselves.

Multilingual Literacy Day, 2014

It's actually International Literacy Day today (8 September), but given how often in the case of multilingual societies statistics on literacy are not clear on what they are measuring and assuming, I'm taking liberty with the title of this brief post.

Recalling how often one encounters or hears of people schooled in Africa - and literate or even highly educated - who say they cannot read their first language, it is worth asking why literacy for polyglots is not more often multilingual literacy. The technical term for this is pluriliteracy (multiliteracy seems to be more often used for ability to read and use diverse media).

Additional thoughts (the morning after)

First, the theme of the 2014 observation of International Literacy Day - "Literacy and Sustainable Development" - highlights an important link. Literacy isn't just nice to have, but fundamental, and this bears reiterating.

Second, my initial comments above come from a long interest in the subject of multilingual literacy or pluriliteracy, especially in Africa. I found it striking that people could go through extensive schooling without ever seeing their maternal languages in print, or learning established (even if historically recent) rules of orthography for them - and then to read discussions of literacy in societies in which these people grew up described as a single thing (as if we were talking about literacy in a monolingual region of the US or China). A regional news summary on the UNESCO site entitled "Celebrating International Literacy Day 2014 in the Sahel countries," for instance, lists many activities, but only in Burkina Faso is there any mention of which languages were involved: "articles related to literacy in French and local languages."

My active interest in this topic goes back to the beginning of the UN Literacy Decade in 2003 when I set up a discussion group on literacy theory, practice, and policy in multilingual contexts worldwide, called "Multilingual Literacy" (Literacy in Multilingual Societies). It sought to promote consideration of questions such as:

• What approaches to adult literacy and basic education for children work best on the countrywide, community and individual levels in multilingual societies?
• Should measures of "literacy" (% literate) be more complex in countries or communities where multiple languages and maybe even scripts are used?
• What other issues arise with various approaches to literacy in countries where many languages are spoken (e.g., language survival, national unity, prioritizing limited education resources, production of materials for post-literacy, role of ICT, meaning of literacy to the people...), and how can they be addressed?
• What about terminology and related concepts? (e.g., multiliteracy, pluriliteracy, multi/bilingualism)

Here's hoping that the next International Literacy Day pays more attention to pluriliteracy in multilingual societies...