Dual Language Instruction: Teaching Civics in Three Public Primary Schools in Tanzania

It is a widely shared hypothesis in Tanzania among educators and the general public that low academic achievement scores are typically due to pupils’ deficiencies in English comprehension. Although in most public primary schools kiSwahili is the language of instruction, while a select few use English, there is evidence showing that even where monolingual instruction is on offer in Tanzania, lessons are held most of the time in both languages concurrently. Much of the research into dual language instruction is driven by the question of whether using English as the language of instruction is superior to using another language, leaving open the question of whether learning in both kiSwahili and English concurrently delivers a better pedagogical result than classroom usage of either language in isolation from the other. In this study, experimenting with the use of Dual Language Instruction (DLI) in three public primary schools indicates that when students are taught in two languages they perform better on tests than those who receive the same lesson content through monolingual instruction.