Baccalauréat · Série A · Anglais — 2021

TEXT — The language of the classroom

On his first day at school, Boukary was six years old and he did not understand a single word of what the teacher said. At home, in his village near Ouahigouya, everybody spoke Mooré. In the classroom, everything was in French.

« For two years, I learned to repeat sentences without knowing what they meant, » he says. « I could read the word bicyclette, but I did not know it was a bicycle. »

Boukary repeated the second year, then the fourth. Many of his friends left school altogether. Out of the sixty-three children who started with him, eleven reached the last year of primary school.

Today, Boukary is a teacher himself, in a bilingual school. His pupils begin in Mooré and learn to read in their own language. French is introduced little by little, from the second year, and becomes the main language of teaching in the fourth.

« People say we are against French, » he laughs. « It is exactly the opposite. My pupils speak better French than I did at their age, because they understood what reading means before they had to do it in a foreign language. You only learn to read once. »