Promoting Multilingualism as a Resource in Education : A Minor Field Study on a Senior Secondary School in The Gambia

Sammanfattning: AbstractThe study aims to explore how students’ linguistic resources are used for learning in a school in Gambia. The study is a field study and was conducted at a Senior Secondary School during January and February 2023. As a postcolonial country, Gambia is a culturally and linguistically highly diverse country with English as the official language and several native languages, also called local languages. Despite this fact, English is the only language of instruction. The local languages are used as the main means of daily communication, while English is used in communication with the authorities and as a language of instruction. The students, in other words, do not learn to read and write in their first language, which is one of the local languages.The theoretical framework for the study is Janks’ theory of critical literacy (2010) which emphasizes the concepts of domination, access, diversity, and design. The method is a qualitative research method with an ethnographic approach, based on interviews with both students and teachers, as well as participant observation and documentation of lessons in several school subjects. The material consists of audio-recorded interviews and field notes from the lesson observations. The results show that the majority of the study’s participants expressed advantages in using all their common linguistic resources in school. However, one teacher considers that he, as a state school employee, is obliged to use only English as the language of instruction and sees no reason to question it. Also, according to one student’s opinion, it is right to use English as a common language, and not to use the local languages as a support for students’ understanding.The result from the classroom observations shows that there is a gap between the students’ requesting more language support in teaching and the teachers’ use of multilingualism as a resource for learning. Only occasional examples and no systematic use of local languages were observed during lessons for promoting learning and multilingual development. Despite this, there were teachers, who, although they were obliged through the curriculum to only use the English language, chose to include students' linguistic resources, interests, and earlier experiences in the curriculum. One conclusion of the study is that the issue of linguistic and cultural diversity in the classroom) is not easy to solve, due to the complex language situation in Gambia. Another conclusion is that teachers, through their choice of a didactic design based on students’ linguistic resources, interests, and earlier experiences, can support students’ access to the curriculum and contribute to a more equitable education. Keywords: Access to the Curriculum, Didactic Design, First Language, Language of Instruction, Language Domination, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Multilingualism