Rethinking Bilingual Education in Postcolonial Contexts

This volume presents a landmark study of bilingual education policy and local practice in a new context. It offers a fresh and thought-provoking African perspective on the value and purpose of bilingual education, foregrounding its transformative potential. Chimbutane’s arguments are grounded in detailed, multilayered research of an innovative sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature. The volume represents a significant new intellectual resource for all of us who are concerned with education in multilingual settings in the global south.

-- Marilyn Martin-Jones, Emeritus Professor, MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism, University of Birmingham, UK

Chimbutane’s delicately balanced and wonderfully accessible volume is a delight to read. The author speaks from the vantage point of a well-positioned postcolonial scholar, and this excellently crafted, well-written and admirably researched piece whets ones appetite for more of the same from the linguistic periphery.

* Christopher Stroud, Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape *

Chimbutane makes a valuable contribution not only to understanding the situation of African languages (AL) but also to ethnographic studies of bilingualism that conceive of a language as social practice...Chimbutane's greatest success is demonstrating the social, political and educational importance of ALs as a mean of instruction and not just as a curricular theme. Chimbutane helps us confirm that the omission of ALs in school reinforces certain postcolonial practices and, therefore, reduces the agency and learning of students. The book itself is a political and research statement showing both what has not yet managed to get into Mozambique BE and also the gradual change that has been generated around ideologies and language policies in favor of AL.

-- Lorena Cordova, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Mexico City on the LINGUIST List 23.