The class room
In a plurilingual community one basic problem in the classroom can be the
number of languages found there. Ohannessian (1978a) found in a survey in
Zambia that the highest number was 17, and only 82 of the 254 classes
examined had a "unilingual" class where more than 80 per cent of the
children spoke one language. He distinguishes three classroom types: (1) a
heavily multilingual class where only a handful are being taught in their
mother tongue, (2) a homogenous group where the language being taught is
not that of the majority group, and (3) a homogenous group where the
majority speaks the approved language as the mother tongue. The problems
resulting from the multilingualism can be heightened by the mutual unintelligibility
of the various languages, so that a teacher may be forced to
interpret the official approved vernacular to the pupils who do not understand
it. Luckily, teachers themselves tend to be multilingual in Zambia,
with an average of three languages per teacher. However, despite the
teacher's own multilingualism, Ohannessian found that only 39 per cent of
the 254 teachers interviewed were teaching their mother tongue, 55 per cent
the language they were most fluent in, and that 42 per cent were teaching
neither. As a result, the teachers were sometimes not teaching the vernacular
in the prescribed lessons, but doing something else like mathematics
or letting the children read. Furthermore, the teachers were sometimes not
familiar with the culture of the children they were teaching, and had to ask
for help with riddles, etc.