Assessing teacher professional development needs for multilingual education

• In Event: Facilitating Teacher Professional Development in Multilingual Contexts of Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal

Proposal

According to data we recently collected in Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Senegal (and presented at CIES 2024), approximately 62% of all students, on average, in Grades 2 and 4 are being taught in languages they do not use or understand well. Most children in these contexts are monolingual in a local language or are “emerging” bilinguals being taught in French, when they are unable to comprehend it well enough to learn. Our data also show that there is a definable cognitive threshold point at which children are ready to learn to read in French only after they have acquired basic reading skills in their first language. Other research shows that teachers have limited access to materials to support both the teaching of local/regional languages as well as the timing of transitioning to French across the three countries. Notably, more than half the teachers across the three countries have not received any in-service teacher training related to language teaching, be it French or the local language, and less than half of who received it say that it was sufficient.

As our organization prepares to pilot a language-focused teacher professional development program in the three countries, we will discuss the language of instruction and teacher training context, along with findings from a baseline evaluation for a school-level randomized controlled trial. Drawing from data from a teacher survey, student assessment, and classroom observations in 100 schools, we will examine teacher performance, student foundational literacy skills across languages, and the barriers and facilitators to effective multilingual teaching. Furthermore, we will draw from additional data on teachers' knowledge, attitudes, and practices toward bilingual pedagogies to provide a comprehensive assessment of the needs for multilingual teacher professional development in the three countries, with applicability to other multilingual contexts.

Author

• Anna McKenzie Warren, American Institutes for Research