Legon Journal of the Humanities, 25
(2014)
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choice was therefore normal and matched community expectations. For the pupils who
may have had very little knowledge or none at all about language policy, their English-
Twi bilingualism was exploited. The language choices that
pupils made in answering
questions indicated their proficiency levels in the two languages: English and Twi. Again,
one would describe their language choices as unmarked since they were expected.
It must be noted that Leteh, the first language of the majority of the pupils was
not used in any of the teachings sessions. If any of the speech participants had spoken
Leteh, that would
have been a marked choice, and would have carried “extra
social
meaning” (Kieswetter, 1995, p. 25). This pattern of language use in education is similar
to what pertains in some multilingual communities in Africa. For instance, Ncoko et al
(2000, p. 239, p.231) reporting on the benefits of codeswitching for teacher education,
recommended that in the multilingual schools in South Africa, codeswitching could be
used as a teaching strategy since it had communicative
functions such as translation,
checking
comprehension,
giving instruction, and clarification.
Similar to observations
made in the present research, the study by Ncoko et al also established that learners utilize
their linguistic ability and resources to control their conversations according to content
and circumstances.
Table 4 summarizes the three scenarios of teaching sessions. In each session, the
language which predominates is listed first.
Table 4
Patterns of Language Choice in Primary 1 Classroom
Domain
Setting
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