Issues in multilingual education in Burundi: The ‘old’ multilingual education system

From 1967 to 2012, Burundi had a formal system of education referred to, today, as old system. This system had initially three languages in education before Swahili was added in 2006. Since 2013, Burundi has a new educational system with four languages in education. This paper aimed to discuss the so called old education system of Burundi as far as languages in education are concerned. It explores issues related to the Burundian old multilingual educational system. Content materials designed by policy makers for languages of instruction and languages taught as subjects have provided substance for the discussion. Furthermore, documents including language education policy documents, content materials and the existing literature were consulted and analysed through content analysis methods. The way the languages were presented and introduced to learners through the content materials was discussed to understand underlying policy makers’ philosophy about how multilingual education should be carried out to achieve expected multilingual competence in the languages involved. It was realised that the system privileged separation of languages to avoid language transfer in order to achieve expected language competence. Crosslinguistic Transfer (interference) was considered to be a hindrance to language competence development and it was to be avoided both through the content materials and the teaching methods during classroom practices.