Students' Perspectives on English-only Instruction

This book is an outcome of the study that began in 2009 and was completed in 2013. It focuses on the policy of English-only instruction in post-colonized nations with Nigeria as typical example. As outlined in the revised edition of the Nigerian National Policy on Education (NPE) of 1981, a Mother Tongue or a language of immediate community is the language of instruction for the first three primary grades, while English is taught as a subject. At the fourth grade, students immerse into English-only classroom for the rest of their formal education. The impact of this policy has remained a material of prolonged debates among nationalists, linguists, educational practitioners, psychologists, etc. An element of this study that is very special is that students are given voice to speak for themselves rather than some academic claiming to speak on their behalf. It is about their lived experiences of language education in school, and they are the rightful authors of their own narratives. As the title suggests, it is about what schoolchildren think. And as you read you get to hear schoolchildren so conflicted with their inclination to primary language and what they are being told otherwise. The participants were the Junior Secondary School (JSS) 3 students from three schools in Southeastern Nigeria. Through a phenomenological method the study explored students' experiences of - and perspectives on English-only mediation and the Mother Tongue education alternative. After you read through the book, you can make your own judgements about the integrated nature of language, culture, and thought in learning and about language policy and pedagogy informed or uninformed by the former.