Liu, Yuncong;
(2025)
How does the Switch of Medium of Instruction (MoI) affect student Opportunity to Learn (OTL) in Three Tanzanian Secondary Schools? A Mixed Methods Case Study.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The question of which language to use as the medium of instruction (MOI) in education has been widely debated in Tanzania for decades. One position is that mother tongue-based education is a critical part of high-quality education (Trudell, 2016a). Besides, many scholars have argued, that the current language policy (use of Swahili as MOI in the primary school and a sudden switch to English in the secondary school) in Tanzania leads to severe pedagogical limitations. However, these arguments have concentrated on debating the language policy itself, without sufficient attention to how MOI affects Opportunity to Learn (OTL), particularly in the era of “education for all” and basic education, which includes secondary education as a universal sustainable development goal. This research investigates how the sudden switch of MOI affects student OTL in Tanzanian secondary schools: community, private and public schools. OTL was captured through an evolving learning evaluation tool, which has three dimensions: (1) content coverage, (2) instructional time, and (3) quality of instruction. This study was a multi-site case study of the three schools in Songea Municipal Council, the capital council of Ruvuma Region in southern Tanzania. Data collection occurred in the years between 2021and 2022, employing methods such as surveys, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews with 234 students and 14 teachers. The findings reveal that all three perspectives included in the OTL are negatively affected by the switch of MOI in all three types of schools although the impact varied by school type. Teachers have adopted ad-hoc techniques for coping with this challenge through code-switching, code mixing, and translation, despite these practices might contradict to government guidelines and policies. The research recommends that policymakers reevaluate the current MOI policy and consider actively incorporating translanguaging strategies in multilingual classroom settings, which could potentially enhance student OTL.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | How does the Switch of Medium of Instruction (MoI) affect student Opportunity to Learn (OTL) in Three Tanzanian Secondary Schools? A Mixed Methods Case Study |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210140 |
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