This presentation delivered at the CIES 2024 conference in Miami describes the bilingual reforms in Senegal and how they are supported through local language specialists (via the local organization ARED) and community engagement. For successful bilingualism, there are a number of challenges to be met in several areas. Reforming the curriculum to address the scope and sequence of national languages in the curriculum, with gradual introduction to French as a second language requires considerable shift in the status quo. Naturally, new textbooks and teaching materials need to be developed, but which languages? At present, 6 languages are taken into account in the reform promoted by the government, but there is a need we need to think more broadly about the gradual introduction of other languages, and their readiness to be used in formal instruction. Under the current reform program, RELIT—Renforcement de la Lecture Initiale pour Tous—is led by the government in collaboration with implementing partners supported by USAID. A detailed program of language mapping and community consultations has helped to lay the groundwork for community acceptance of national language instruction and identifying which language will be used in each school based on the majority language in the community. Preparing communities for such a significant change also involves community consultations and a large social and behavior change communications campaign. While these broad changes are critical to the larger ecosystem of school reform, ultimately teachers need to implement the reforms, and therefore a significant task is upskilling teachers in using these national languages for instruction. Some teachers also need to improve their skills in speaking and reading these languages, which have largely been oral languages until recently. Policy and curricular reforms therefore need to take into consideration teacher recruitment, teacher preparation and placement in schools. Such issues of curriculum, societal attitudes, and teacher training are relatively easily anticipated. However, there are a host of smaller details that only implementation of such a significant program can reveal. Should the curriculum include teaching cursive writing in national languages, which has always been the norm in French, even though no cursive forms yet exist for certain letters of the languages? For instruction in both national languages and French, should materials be developed in separate volumes, or do both languages appear side-by-side in textbooks and learning materials? What messages resonate with communities, who may resist national language instruction? And how best to bring teachers on board with such a monumental change? This presentation will discuss the processes and findings of multiple action research activities in the context of the RELIT program.

This presentation delivered at the CIES 2024 conference in Miami describes the bilingual reforms in Senegal and how they are supported through local language specialists (via the local organization ARED) and community engagement