Children, Their Schools and What They Learn on Beginning Primary School

This research is a pioneering study in comparative education in the context of Cameroon in particular, and Africa in general, which highlights present-day school and classroom instances of language socialisation as instantiating Anglophone and Francophone education traditions in their representation of the British and French educational legacies from the colonial era. Its findings point to practices specific to each study site and to Anglophone and Francophone subsystems of education as they translate local, national and global education perspectives and parallel Anglophone and Francophone cultures writ large. The narrative, analysis and findings of this study are, therefore, of relevance to educational communities in other countries, as issues of language socialisation, ideology, identity, bilingualism/multilingualism and comparative education are raised from a language- and culture-learning angle. The findings of this work also present emerging patterns of communal practices resulting from the coexistence of both subsystems of education, while the empirical data presented expose an inadequacy between official bilingualism discourse and its implementation in schools which may have a significant impact on future orientation of this policy in schools in Cameroon.This book will be useful to scholars interested in the fields of language socialisation and comparative education in general, and in Africa and Cameroon in particular. It will also be of interest to language policymakers in the context of Cameroon, as data from schools indicate that official bilingualism practice does not echo policy discourse and problematises the construct of a Cameroonian identity as constitutive of Anglophone, Francophone and local cultures. The data report, however, shows that the paradigm shift in teachers’ perceptions about the value of languages apparently influenced pupils’ attitudes towards the various languages to which they were being socialised, both at home and in school, and particularly shaped their understanding of the necessity of learning the second official language.