Pedagogical practices teachers use to teach cinyanja in monolingual tumbuka secondary schools of chasefu district in eastern province of zambia

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the pedagogical practices teachers use to teach Cinyanja to the Tumbuka learners of Chasefu district. The objectives were to ascertain the pedagogical practices that teachers use to teach Cinyanja in the secondary schools of Chasefu district, establish the pedagogical challenges being faced by the teachers to teach Cinyanja in the secondary schools of Chasefu district, and how best Cinyanja can be taught in Chasefu schools. A descriptive phenomenological design was used on the population of teachers, administrators, and learners in Chasefu district who were randomly sampled. The study sample was 60, which included five (5) deputy head teachers, five (5) heads of department for the department of Literature and Languages, ten (10) teachers of Cinyanja, and forty (40) pupils in five secondary schools. Data was collected through interviews, classroom observation, and focus group discussion guides. The findings revealed that teachers avoided certain pedagogical practices they had little or no knowledge about. The common pedagogical practices they used included discussions, individual work, pair work, group work, translation and code-switching. The pedagogical practices they avoided included debate, research, project work, drama, sketch, play activities and simulations and role plays. In terms of pedagogical challenges that teachers faced, the study revealed that there were inadequate teaching and learning materials, low literacy levels among learners, L1 interference causing code mixing in the works of the learners, negative attitude of the learners towards the subject and word for word translation when handling translation exercises. The study concluded that the teaching of Cinyanja in monolingual areas like Chasefu needed the implementation of translanguaging practices since they already use the practices in schools. The study recommended that translanguaging practices be used in training and teaching regional languages where monolingualism is more prevalent than the target language.