Acceso usuarios
This paper examines the micro planning activities that schools engage in to address learners’ needs to make education work in rural primary schools of Botswana. The national language plan prescribes the use of English and Setswana only as languages of instruction at the primary school level. However, this plan is not practical in some regions where Setswana is not spoken as a first language, therefore, teachers and school administrators engage in the informal use of some of the learners’ mother tongues. The study uses the qualitative approach to investigate the communication strategies adopted to address communication problems. Open-ended questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews were used to investigate the problem. Participants in the study involved teachers, school management and principal education officers as implementers of language policy. The findings indicate that although the language-in-education policy stipulates that Setswana and English are to be used for early learning as languages of instruction, some of the learners in rural primary schools neither speak nor understand the languages of instruction and this scenario creates communication problems during the teaching and learning process. Teachers and school management seek the services of cooks, teacher aide and learners to address the problem. The study concludes that macro-language planning does not adequately produce desired results and therefore teachers and school administrators seek communication strategies at the micro-level to address the needs of learners.
