Rwanda is one of few countries in Africa where, in principle, all citizens have a common language, Kinyarwanda. However, for educational purposes, French, the language of the former colonisers, was used as a medium of instruction from secondary school and all through university studies. All higher ranking positions required fluency in French. Already in the 1960ies English was introduced in secondary education as a foreign language but its status was low compared to French. After the genocide, 1994, many Rwandans returned from exile, some from Anglophone and some from Francophone countries. At the same time a massive investment was made within higher education. So did the number of graduates at the National University increase to 1987 (2005/2006) which is more than the total number of graduates between 1963 and 1993. Most teachers were from the beginning French-speaking but after 1994 an increasing number of lecturers from English-speaking countries were employed. Besides, the university started to attract English-speaking students as former policies of ethnic and regional quotas were abandoned. Hence, university education had to become bilingual in French and English (Vision 2020; MINEDUC). The current situation intrigued our paper where we investigate strategies employed by students to facilitate learning within this multilingual context where Kinyarwanda is a common language but not accepted as a medium of instruction. The study focuses on two major questions: • How do students handle the linguistic diversity they are exposed to? • What strategies do the students employ to facilitate learning? The research tools used to gather data are questionnaires, essays and students’ informal group-work. Data were analysed drawing upon theories related to learning in multilingual settings and discourse analysis. Theories of language politics are used to frame our study (e.g. Teleman, 2002) and discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough, 1992) are used to analyse official documents concerning language policy. In the two former data sets students stick to one language. However, in students’ informal group-work outside class a variety of code-switching, code-mixing, transfer and borrowing occur (Harding and Riley, 1986; Romaine, 1995) as the aim of the group-work is to solve a specific task and enhance learning. An intriguing question is how the negotiations using two or three languages impact students learning (Ianco Worrall, 1972). Tentative findings show that language diversity, on the one hand, has potential of facilitating learning, thus emphasizing the complementarities rather than the exclusion of languages used in Rwanda. On the other hand, what the participants described as “lack of background knowledge” might be a sign of an underlying language problem, where students memorise teachers’ notes and reproduce them during any kind of evaluation, without questioning and reflecting on the material in order to convert information into knowledge.

Discourse analysis / Questionnaires, documents, essays and tape-recorded group-work

Tentative findings show that language diversity, on the one hand, has potential of facilitating learning, thus emphasizing the complementarities rather than the exclusion of languages used in Rwanda. On the other hand fluency in two foreign languages may hamper access to higher education.