Medadi Ssentanda

• PhD (General Linguistics), Stellenbosch University, South Africa
• Lecturer at Makerere University

The question of using English as a language of learning and teaching (LoLT) has been around for some time, but limited studies have been conducted in Africa’s multilingual context to understand the challenges involved. In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate the difficulties in the classroom interactions between teachers and learners in four rural...

This article is a historical investigation of language-in-education policy in Uganda. It compares educational reports from the 1890s to the 2000s with research from cultural history to trace how language ideologies shaped the use of English and African languages in Ugandan schools. The historical perspective seeks to complement current research on...

İn this chapter, a brief definition and historical overview of medium of instruction development in Sub-Saharan Africa is provided as well as an overview of the language of instruction policies of selected SSA countries and how language of instruction policies manifest in teacher training (Nel & Medadi, 2023). The chapter draws on systematic review...

In this paper, we discuss teachers' views and related classroom practices of teaching the mother tongue, (MT) Luganda as a subject, as observed in rural classrooms in central Uganda. The challenges observed arise from the lack of and, in some cases, limited training of teachers in MT teaching. Also, there is a disjointed approach to the teaching of...

This article is an ethnographic investigation into the power and ideological relation between English and Luganda in the sociocultural and pedagogic spaces of rural primary schools in Uganda. This study focuses on the ‘schoolscape’ and examines how teachers choose the languages they use for instruction. The article also examines how signage within...

Africa has over 2000 languages; however, those languages are not well represented in the existing Natural Language Processing ecosystem. African languages lack essential digital resources to be engaged effectively in the advancing language technologies. This growing gap has attracted researchers to empower and build resources for African languages...

This article seeks to understand the challenges of literacy acquisition under the Thematic Curriculum reform in Uganda, which introduced Mother Tongue instruction in lower primary. We compare teachers’ perspectives from two a central district using Luganda and two peripheral districts using Ateso, drawing on a multi-layered approach to understand t...

This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedag...

Surgidos há quase 80 anos, os super-heróis das histórias em quadrinhos vêm adquirindo cada vez mais fãs de todas as idades. O gênero de superaventura surgiu em 1938 com a revista Action Comics, na qual nasceu o primeiro superherói das HQs, o “Superman”. Este foi criado pelos adolescentes Joe Schuster e Jerry Siegel. Um ano depois surgiu “Batman”, e...

Literacy in the early years is crucial but attained amidst various challenges, especially in the Global South. Based on fieldwork conducted in October 2018 in four primary schools in Gulu district, Acoli region, northern Uganda, this study investigates school characteristics and facilities available to learners and teachers to scaffold the acquisit...

The purpose of this article is to highlight teachers’ beliefs and practices towards storytelling in the mother tongue in Ugandan rural classrooms and the effect this could have on efforts to promote reading, such as the mother-tongue (MT) education programme in Uganda and the African Storybook Project (ASb). The article demonstrates that although t...

The expectation of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) of Uganda is that, using a thematic curriculum, learners in rural schools will learn at least 800 English words after three years of instruction in the language as a subject. This article draws on available literature on vocabulary learning by children and on results from a study...

We present digital languagel resources frm the Leipzig Corpus Collection and the TypeCraft Interlinear Glossed Text repository in a study of the Luganda applicative. The Bantu applicative is one of the central topics in Bantu studies. In a case study of the Luganda applicative we establish a relation between character pattern and morphological for...

The year 2015 was set as deadline to realise the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were authored in 2000 by 189 states in the world. Language is at the heart of MDGs (Barron, 2012; Romaine, 2013). Some scholars look at language (development) as a measure and/or determinant of development (e.g. Romaine, 2013). This paper examines Uganda’s co...

This chapter explores language attitudes and practices in Uganda. Uganda is a multilingual country with over 41 indigenous languages. Despite this number, all the official languages are foreign, i.e. English and Swahili. The chapter gives a linguistic description of the country, paints a picture of the use of English and Swahili as the official lan...

This paper aims to explain the trend of mother tongue (MT) education in Uganda by examining particularly the government’s practices towards MT education. Because of disappointing levels of literacy attained by learners, In English: MT education was (re)introduced in Uganda in 2006/2007 with the hope of improving literacy skills particularly among...

Ugandan English is a variety that has scarcely been noticed in past research. This timely volume brings together African and European scholars in a first-ever collection of articles that offer comprehensive discussions of the historical and present-day sociolinguistics of English in Uganda and fine-grained analyses of the structural characteristics...

http://theconversation.com/ugandas-private-schools-must-stop-snubbing-language-learning-policy-46819

The paper gives a genesis of the problems affecting mother tongue education in Uganda.

In this paper, I discuss the challenges experienced by both learners and teachers at the time of introducing reading.

The Uganda language-in-education policy is silent about pre-primary schooling. This level of education is largely in the hands of private individuals who, because of wide-spread misconceptions about learning and acquiring English in Uganda (as in many other African countries), instruct pre-primary school learners in English. This article demonstrat...

English is the first official language in Uganda and it is learnt as a second language (L2) in the country. The language-in-education policy allows for the teaching of English as subject for the first three years in rural schools before it is initiated as a language of learning and teaching (LoLT) from the fourth year onwards. Urban schools use thi...

Mother-tongue (MT) education in Uganda, like in many other countries, is a highly contentious subject. A plethora of problems plague MT education and all are similar to those mentioned in more than six decades of research and evaluations on the topic from numerous countries across the world. Based on fieldwork conducted in four primary schools in t...

The provision of a uniform, practical-informed mother tongue (MT) education policy has proven to be a major challenge to the Ugandan government’s attempt to solve the problem of poor literacy acquisition in the initial years of primary schooling. Given Uganda's multilingual context, said policy, introduced in 2006/2007 with hopes of improving learn...