Bilingual education with bilingual plays: Abdallah's ‘The Witch of Mopti’ as a model.

Abstract

Many African countries that were colonised imbibed the coloniser's language as their own and used them as their national language. The local languages have mostly been relegated to domestic communication. There have been however, recent debates to introduce local languages as national language and to be used as medium of instruction in schools. This paper contributes to these debates and proposes the use of drama in the teaching and learning of local languages. It argues that drama uses dialogue, gestures, movements, props and can integrate music and dances which are created in context for selective and appropriate language and culture. Drama becomes even more potent in aiding the learning of language when it is written in multilingual dialogue as in the plays of Mohammed Ben Abdallah. The paper employs conceptual analysis to discuss Abdallah's The Witch of Mopti in which he uses bilingual dialogue as a model that could aid the learning of a local language.