Leveraging Educational Quality in Southern African Educational Systems: A Practitioners� Perspective

Chapter 2. Enhancing quality in the teaching and learning of English in Mozambique’s Public Education: Lessons from the past and current experiences

23 Chapter 2 Enhancing quality in the teaching and learning of English in Mozambique’s Public Education: Lessons from the past and current experiences Munyaradzi Mawere Abstract In Mozambique, the English subject has been implemented in public education, particularly in the primary education (second grade-EP2)grade 6 and 7- and secondary schools (grade 8-12). This was done to meet the growing demand for the professional use of the global language of power, English. The political economy of Mozambique as a Portuguese colony for almost five hundred years (1505-1975) is therefore deeply implicated in discourses on the appropriateness of Portuguese as a language of engagement among Mozambican people in different ways. However, continued use of Portuguese as the official language after independence in 1975, for example, meant that the country would remain isolated from the English world for as long as Portuguese is the dominant language. It is against this background that the learning and teaching of English in Mozambique has been a mammoth task since its implementation in school curriculum in 1992. This study examines the difficulties encountered by both Mozambican teachers and students in the teaching/learning of English in public schools. The research, which was conducted at selected schools in Gaza province employed semi-structured questionnaire as a data collection tool. Frequency tables were used to qualitatively analyse and provide evaluative descriptions of the findings. Findings suggest that scarcity of qualified teachers coupled with lack of relevant materials (like English textbooks) were among the major problems that made the teaching and learning of English a challenge in the Mozambique’s public education. The study submits 24 as one of its recommendations that qualified teachers should be deployed in Mozambican schools to replace and/or further train those currently holding English teaching positions if quality is to be improved. Introduction Among the most spoken languages in the world are 10 languages named in their order: Marandian, English, Spanish, Hindu/Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian and French (Abbas, 2010). At global level, and in particular Africa, English is fast becoming the most spoken and an official language for many countries. Weber (1997) echoes this in terms of the number of countries where each of the ten languages mentioned above is spoken with English being the most spoken language followed by French. More so, in Southern African region, many countries except Mozambique (and South Africa and Namibia which use Afrikaans in some of their schools) use English as their official language in schools, job markets and sometimes at home. Mozambique is the only country in the region that uses Portuguese as its official language in public schools and job markets. Consequently, Mozambique has often experienced subtle forms of exclusion in terms of trading, working with some English speaking donors, tourism, exchange of educational resources and in participation in regional and global politics, only to mention a few examples of cases of isolation. Having experienced these challenges, after its independence from Portugal and the civil war that ended in 1992, Mozambique took a bold step to introduce English as one of the subjects taught in public schools, of course, along with Portuguese. This intervention was challenging in light of the country’s crippling poverty levels, lack of adequate training for English teachers, and the country’s unfortunate long period (almost five hundred years) of domination by the Portuguese people. Yet, although the problem of English in public education is ubiquitous and widely known by Mozambicans and other scholars beyond Mozambique’s boarders, there has been paucity of research, 25 particularly on the problems encountered in the teaching and learning of the subject (English) in the curriculum. This is because while indigenous/local languages are as important as any other language in the world, it is important to acknowledge that English is increasingly becoming the most widely spoken language in business, education, political gatherings, job markets and many other arenas the world over. As such, it is now a necessity, whether like it or not, for nonEnglish speaking people to acquire knowledge of English if they are to be able to “operate well” in the global world. In fact having taught in Mozambique’s public university and schools, and researched extensively on Mozambique’s educational issues in the past few years, I have come to the realization that most researchers on Mozambican education (Mario 2002; Mario & Nandja 2006; Mulkeen 2005; Chaudhury et al 2006) have paid...