Cameroon prior to colonization had many languages, with none having precedence over the other. With the development of trade and the installation of missionaries along its coast, a number of local and European languages gained prominence. English became the most widely used western language. It established itself as the language of trade and of the court of equity while some local languages and Pidgin English were standardized and used in evangelization. With the triple presence in succession, and concurrently, of the German protectorate, the British and the French administrations, the ideology of 'one nation, one language' that developed in eighteenth century Europe was pursued, with varying degrees of effectiveness, in Cameroon by these administrations. This ideology was applied with resolve in education, mostly by the French rule, and made an impact on pre-and post-independence Cameroonian authorities who adopted English and French as official languages of the country.
This study draws on the concepts of instrumental and expressive orders to analyse school practice in two Anglophone and two Francophone primary schools in Cameroon, and how micro processes of language socialisation in the schools studied instantiated Anglophone and Francophone education traditions and related to macro processes of systems of education. Using a multimodal method of data collection, including participant observation, focus group and individual interviews, the study adopts a vertical case study approach which corresponds to Bernstein's down-top data collection and analysis approach of research in schools, and draws its comparative stance from the contextualisation of studied cases as a microcosm of global education practice. The study considers the pupils, their classroom, their school, the language that they are socialised into, and the culture that it mediates as units of analysis, and participant observation as a research method into the social life of pupils and their school that seeks to gain an insight into the intricacy of studied phenomenon from the comparative perspective of the dialectic of the local and the global.
Language, Identity and Contemporary Society (2nd edition) Rajesh Kumar and Om Prakash (eds) (2019) Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pp. 239 ISBN: 9781527520332(hbk) ISBN: 1527520331 (hbk)
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