Clinton Robinson

Despite general agreement that a 21st-century learning society must also be a literate society, there is still a long way to go to achieve a broad consensus on how to achieve this within an explicit lifelong learning vision. The Seventh International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII - June 2022) is an excellent opportunity to rethink li...

In the multilingual environments of Africa, national literacy policies vary in terms of the attention they give to the roles and purposes of local, national and international languages. In the context of the global Sustainable Development Agenda, the instrumental purpose of literacy is often assumed, if not explicitly spelled out. At community leve...

Linguistic diversity characterizes many countries with large literacy needs. Meeting these needs will require a multilingual approach based on learning initial literacy in the learner’s mother tongue, with other languages used subsequently. This article identifies five major challenges in implementing multilingual programmes and traces the internat...

Acquisition Planning (AP) is concerned with the range of language users and the distribution of literacy. As a form of language management (Spolsky, 2004) it complements and interacts with status planning (which is about the social role or function of a language) and corpus planning (used to modify the structure of a language). This interconnection...

Africa - a continent of vibrant life and hope or a continent of Stagnation and slow regress? A place of rieh heritage or of hopeless future? It depends on where you are Standing. The paradoxes abound - plentiful resources, yet stark deprivation; rieh relationships, yet sharp eleavages; self-reliant communities, yet dependent economies; spiritual de...

Context is a key factor in dedigning and delivering adult learning programmes, and in multilingual environments the choice of language plays a decisive role. Four programmes, two in Asia (Bhutan Myanmar) and two in Africa (Ghana and Uganda), which focus on learning for development, integrate language considerations in different ways, related both t...

The Education for All (EFA) goals aim to increase adult literacy levels by 50% by 2015, and yet the number without access to literacy remains obstinately high at over 800 million. This paper examines a number of initiatives, such as the Millennium Development goals, EFA and the UN Literacy Decade, and assesses what level of priority their discourse...

Without Abstract

Recent concern about the nature of different literacies points to the need to examine the place of language in differentiating literacies, as a factor which shapes the nature of literacy acquisition and practices. This paper looks at evidence for the relationship between languages and literacies, their purposes, and social meanings, in the multilin...

Development models have moved away from the simple export or imitation of western patterns towards local ownership and participatory approaches. This movement has brought with it increasing attention to the place of culture, ethnicity and language in development. In situations of high linguistic diversity, debate has concentrated largely on languag...

This paper examines the need for accountability in language planning in multilingual contexts in the South. After a brief overview of language diversity in the South, it notes that this multilingual reality has often been ignored by policy-makers acting in their own interests, unaccountable to those affected by their decisions. It considers how wor...

This paper addresses the question of mother-tongue education of children, especially in francophone countries of Africa. It seeks to contribute to the debate on the integration of local languages into educational systems in multilingual settings by stressing the opposing cultural messages carried by official and indigenous languages. Schooling in W...

This paper examines the issue of community ownership with reference to an adult literacy and basic education programme in NW Zaire. After a discussion of community ownership, stressing the need for local control and relevance to local needs, it outlines the context and development of the programme in NW Zaïre and considers the degree to which owner...

This paper addresses the difficulties of using minority languages for literacy. Three strands are identified in the debate: educational, economic/political and developmental. Each perspective on its own advances reasons and objections for promoting minority languages, but there is a need for dialogue between these sectors. The economic argument aga...

Drawing on the examples of two very different countries— Canada and Cameroon—this paper compares efforts to support minority languages in the North (the developed, industrialised countries) and the South (the developing world). Both parts of the world manifest a large number of minorities, some of which are indigenous, others of which have migrated...

Whole issue. Incl. graphs, tabl., bibl. CD (in the French and Spanish versions only). Tables.