PROMOTING FRENCH-ENGLISH INDIVIDUAL BILINGUALISM THROUGH EDUCATION IN CAMEROON

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2005 by Kouega, Jean-Paul

To add to the list of failures outlined above, the government Ministry of Primary and secondary Education unexpectedly announced, in the year 2000, a series of measures aimed at re-booting the OL2 course in the education system. These measures center around the introduction of the OL2 course in all primary school classes, which is an extension of the program that had been limited to the last three classes of the primary level since 1975. Henceforth, the subject will be evaluated in both the written and oral parts of the First School Leaving Certificate examination and its French counterpart. A syllabus has been drawn, and classroom teaching will be done by the regular teachers of each class, who, needless to say, are not bilingual themselves.10 The implementation of these measures is underway. By introducing early bilingualism into education, the state's objective seems to be that a larger portion of the population would end up being proficient in the second official language: Anglophone children would learn some French and Francophone children would learn some English. What seems to be overlooked here is that official bilingualism is not needed by every member of the community. It is needed mainly by the social elite, not the mass of laborers and farmers. What the latter need is some degree of competence in one or the other official language, but not necessarily both. This means that early bilingualism is likely to become a veritable distraction rather than a facilitator in their OLl acquisition endeavor.

Researchers like Todd" and Tchoungui,12 and state officials, especially those of the Ministry of Education, seem to agree on the fact that the various attempts made by the state to promote official bilingualism in the country have failed to turn out bilingual citizens. Several recommendations and suggestions have been made, including amongst others: the creation of an official body to oversee the practice of bilingualism in the country; the redesigning of school syllabuses and of teacher training syllabuses; the selection of relevant books that meet syllabus specifications; the revision of teaching methods; the organization of seminars and workshops to discuss common issues; the increase of OL2 teaching hours; the granting of some fringe benefits to teachers involved in the OL2 program; the elevation of the OL2 course to the status of an end-of-course examination subject; to name only these few. Of all these recommendations, only the last one cited above, namely, the elevation of the OL2 course to the status of an end-of-course examination subject, has been taken into account in the last action taken by the state and outlined above.

In view of the above, one is tempted to believe that the state is either simply incompetent or has a hidden agenda for official bilingualism other than its effective implementation. It is not clear why the problem of incentives is not addressed. It is also not clear why the problem of textbook selection keeps coming up: it appears that all books for education at the secondary level are selected by a group of individuals who are handpicked on a yearly basis by the Minister of Education and who have no expertise in the subjects treated in these books. If teachers of a given subject were asked to propose a good and appropriate textbook for their subject, perhaps the problem would have been solved by now. The same can be said of the other recommendations, which have been coming up repeatedly since 1961. Assuming that the state has no hidden agenda for its bilingualism policy, the present researcher proposes a new course of action that will lead to mass production of citizens with official bilingualism skills.