Characteristic of the twenty-first century are new literacy practices that require users and producers to be fluent with the affordances of multiple modes across print and digital media. In under-resourced contexts such as East Africa, these complex new multimodal practices have not been well documented. In this paper, we explore the context of an…

Despite advances in multilingual education (MLE) scholarship, education in most African societies remain characteristically congruent with colonial normative monolingual and transitional multilingual policies, which limit the use of native language(s) as media of instruction to early primary schooling. This contributes to poor educational and…

Research in educational linguistics is now challenging the efficacy of monolingual approaches that often dominate educational practices in multilingual settings. In most African nations where multilingualism is the norm, there remains a persistent reluctance by educational stakeholders (principals, teachers, parents, and students) to embrace…

Observing that place may be understood in a range of sometimes conflicting ways, the paper picks up on recent work within literacy studies on notions of place-making and locational disadvantage to argue for increasingly sophisticated and reflexive uses of place in the field, as a counterpoint to both increasing educational standardisation and…

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls' residential secondary school in…

Issues affecting pre-school education in a rural area of Kenya are highlighted in a study of a mother tongue education (MTE) programme in one indigenous language group, the Pokomo. Factors supporting the introduction of MTE include official support for MTE, the welcoming of non-government stakeholder involvement in education, the presence of…

This paper explores the discourse of whole class teaching in Kenyan and Nigerian primary school English lessons. Twenty lessons were analysed using a system of discourse analysis focusing on the teacher-led three-part exchange sequence of Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF). The focus of the analysis was on the first and third part of the IRF…