Didacticization of Code Switching as a Tool for Bilingual Education in Mali

Mali has started experimentation of teaching the national language (Bambara) at school in 1980, but it is in 2002 that eleven of the thirteen former national languages have been experienced in primary schools through the convergent pedagogy (CP). The aim was to improve the Malian educational system because the use of French as the only medium of instruction was considered a contributing factor to the significant number of student dropouts and the high rate of repetition. The Convergent pedagogy highlights the knowledge acquired by children at home, their vision of the world and especially the knowledge they have of their mother tongue. One of the challenges of the Malian bilingual education curriculum is the question of ‘effective languages management’. Theoretically, depending on the classrooms, an average has been established for each of the involved languages. Following that, teachers make use of code switching (hereafter CS) differently, sometimes it favors the learners, other times, it contributes to the development of some linguistic weaknesses. The present research tries to fill that gap through a tentative model of didacticization of CS. The overall goal of this research is the didacticization of code switching as a real tool for bilingual education. The methodology adopted is a qualitative one. The study is based on recorded videos of primary school classrooms. The results show that CS is an important element of bilingual education the usage of which needs to be constrained to didactic purposes in the classroom context.