Equipping teachers to respond to language diversity in Africa’s classrooms

By Caroline Grant, Senior Global Education Adviser, and Vanessa Komiliades, Head of Professional Development, British Council.

Teachers are one of the most important resources for improving learner outcomes, with the ability to make a profound difference in pupils’ lives even when other resources are scarce. The global literature, together with evidence from the British Council’s work with education systems in Africa, highlights the importance of putting teachers and teacher professional development at the forefront of education reforms to improve equitable learning outcomes. 

A shared belief among teachers in a school that their combined efforts can positively impact student achievement, especially for those who are struggling because they don’t understand the language of learning and teaching, can have a positive impact on learning.  It is therefore important that teachers are equipped to help students access the curriculum, particularly when it is delivered in an unfamiliar language, such as English. 

Across Africa, millions of children arrive at school already speaking two or more languages. Language shapes children’s identity and sense of belonging and can be central to how they think and participate and to their confidence. A learner who struggles to answer a question in English may understand the underlying concept perfectly well and be able to express that in a more familiar language, but when knowledge is assessed only through an unfamiliar language, we risk measuring English proficiency rather than actual learning.

Through professional development opportunities, teachers can be equipped with techniques to help their students to understand and learn.  Multilingual approaches allow students to make use of all of the languages available to them, and teachers can also use simple visuals and gestures, provide model sentence frames, and build in activities with pair work and thinking time so that learners can participate with confidence. 

Where learners share languages, they can first explore a difficult concept in a familiar language, discuss it with classmates, and then learn how to express the same idea in English. A teacher might also introduce English terminology while using a home language to check comprehension or explain unfamiliar material. These approaches reflect how multilingual people naturally think and communicate. Languages do not exist in completely separate compartments in the mind, so it can be helpful to support learners to draw on their full linguistic repertoire to understand the world, solve problems, and express themselves.

When a classroom becomes language-responsive in this way, participation increases, complex concepts become easier to understand, classroom anxiety is reduced, and learners become more willing to ask questions, test ideas and contribute to discussions. Most importantly, children are not required to leave part of their identity at the classroom door before they can learn. 

In African countries, English is an important language of higher education, research, international collaboration and employment across many sectors. Proficiency can open doors to innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-border opportunities. However, access to those opportunities should not depend on children abandoning the languages through which they first learned to think, communicate and make sense of the world.

An additive approach to multilingual education starts from the perspective that gaining a new language should not require losing an existing one. Strong literacy in a child’s first language can provide a foundation for acquiring English and other languages, and rather than competing, languages can reinforce one another.

This approach also changes how we understand inclusion since an inclusive classroom is not simply one in which every child is physically present; it is one in which every child can participate, understand, contribute, and succeed.

Education systems need to equip teachers with practical training and professional development opportunities, appropriate learning materials to use with students, and guidance on how and when to use different languages. Curriculum design, assessment and teacher development should all consider language as central to learning.

This language-responsive approach is central to the British Council’s work with teachers, education systems and partners globally and across Africa. Through professional development, classroom research and collaboration with ministries of education, we support educators to use language-supportive techniques that strengthen comprehension, participation and progression towards English proficiency, whilst also advocating for more inclusive approaches to language across the curriculum to enable learners to succeed.

Africa’s challenge is not that its children speak too many languages; multilingualism is one of the continent’s greatest educational resources and is to be valued and celebrated. The challenge is that many teachers lack effective pre-service and in-service teacher professional development in multilingual approaches to equip them to support learners  from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Equitable and more language-responsive approaches to education recognise the opportunity that learning English can bring for children, whilst also valuing and elevating the many languages that learners bring with them to the classroom. The vision is for teachers and learners to move confidently between languages, cultures and opportunities, grounded in who they are and equipped to engage with the wider world.