One often cited challenge to effective mother tongue-based bilingual education (MTBE) in multilingual countries like Ghana is the difficulty of developing curriculum and instructional materials in many languages. To explain this situation, factors such as shortage of writers and teachers in the local languages, lack of interest on the part of…

The voices of the main stakeholders in literacy and schooling--pupils and parents--have seldom been given adequate space in studies of school and classroom discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. The present paper attempts to redress this imbalance by presenting the voices of pupils from a multilingual urban primary school in Ghana and of parents from a…

Studies on classroom practices in Africa and the developing world tend to report on the visible general features, i.e. code switching, rote learning, memorisation and safe talk, with very little on the micro, invisible, classroom life. This article, based on the findings of a study involving classroom observations of teachers and pupils'…