Success or failure? the effect of the language of tests on students' academic achievement in rural senegal
- Autores: Alexandre Martin Chazeaud
- Directores de la Tesis: María Luz Celaya Villanueva (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Elsa Tragant Mestres de la Torre (presid.), Amparo Lázaro Ibarrola (secret.), Maria González-Davies (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Lingüísticos, Literarios y Culturales por la Universidad de Barcelona
- Materias:
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- Resumen
SUMMARY In most Sub-Saharan countries, children grow up in a local environment attached to a culture and an identity which are embraced by a local language. However, when they start compulsory school at the age of six, they have to face a curriculum which is taught and assessed from the first year in a European language foreign to them and, in most cases, culturally far from their own reality.
According to Heugh (2006; 2011b), these children must face a language barrier in monolingual educational systems in which a second language (L2) is the unique medium of instruction and where their mother tongue (L1) has no place. In such circumstances, learners are deprived from access to an education of quality and, consequently, obtain low results in tests, a fact depicted by Skutnabb-Kangas (2009: 1) as a “genocide and a crime against humanity”. As a result of school failure and grade repetition, young students feel demotivated and families encourage their children to drop out formal education in order to participate in the economy of the family or in the household at very young ages (Magga, Nicolaisen, Task, Skutnabb-Kangas and Dunbar, 2005; Brock-Utne, 2014). In other words, those educational systems which do not consider the learners’ L1 as a medium of instruction do not represent any longer the means by which knowledge and language are taught for future and personal growth, but instead, the means which generates a vicious circle of failure and socio-linguistic indifference, including poverty and social exclusion (Mohanty, 2009).
This fact is of special interest to the female population living in rural areas of Sub-Saharan countries. Benson (2001a; 2001b) argues that females are considered academically incompetent as compared to males because they obtain low scores in tests and show an inactive presence during lectures, not only due to the fact that they scarcely understand lessons, but also to their hard responsibilities within the household. Benson (2005a) proposes that instruction through the mother tongue can have positive effects on females’ scores at school, a fact which leads to motivation and active participation in the learning process.
Therefore, in such contexts, tests are designed in a European language when only 5% to 10% of the population, generally the high socio-economic class, is proficient in it (Brock-Utne and Alidou, 2006). According to Shohamy (2006) this circumstance creates an unfair situation known by the researcher as the power of tests in which only those students who master the official language can succeed at school. With the purpose of analysing students’ academic achievement depending on the language in which they take tests, the present study was carried out in rural Senegal. It gathered data from 149 participants (66 males and 83 females) who attended grade 3 or grade 6. They were given two types of tests: Six multiple-choice questions of social and natural sciences and three mathematical problem-solving tasks, with a different degree of language complexity and context familiarity.
Participants were divided into an experimental group if they were given the tests in their mother tongue (L1 Sérère) and a control group, if they received the tests in the official language of formal education (L2 French). As revealed by the results obtained, L1 Sérère as language of tests benefitted students at both the quantity and the quality of their outcomes, and this was specially true for females. Moreover, the present study gave further evidence to Cummins’ theories Interdependence and Threshold Hypotheses and supported Heugh (2011b), Benson (2013) and Brock-Utne’s (2016) idea that school curricula in developing countries should consider the students’ L1 as medium of instruction and language of tests at school, at least during six years, with the purpose of developing linguistic and academic skills in the L1 for later transferring them to the European language as L2.
