Language Policy and Conflict as Learning Barriers: The Plight of Linguistic Minority Schoolchildren in Darfur, Sudan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates learning difficulties of the linguistic minority schoolchildren (LMS) in Darfur, Sudan, in the contexts of the current conflict and the official monolingual policy. Employing quantitative and qualitative data gathering tools, we examined how the LMS at the internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps were educationally disadvantaged due to their low proficiency in Arabic, curricula developed insensitively to their identities and cultures, and how parents and teachers perceived of teaching the children in Arabic as the sole medium of instruction. The study concluded that monolingualism in education resulted in the underachievement of the IDPs schoolchildren; the vast majority of the parents and a great number of teachers believed the children could have achieved better had the teachers used, besides Arabic, native languages in teaching; and that learning of the children could be improved if their ethnic identities and cultures were integrated in curricula. Preferences of teaching the children in Arabic among the parents were primarily attributed to the current conflict, which gave rise to the revitalisation of native languages in Darfur. The teachers’ preferences thereof, however, differed – crudely traceable between one group of monolingual supporters whose perceptions were informed by their internalised state ideology of Arabicisation and another group of multilingual proponents whose viewpoints were derived from the trendy approaches favouring multilingualism in education. The findings also suggested that the government deliberately distanced itself from taking remedial interventions to mitigate the underachievement of the children with the expectation the displacement would expedite their linguistic and cultural assimilation, which have not only rendered them the most linguistically disenfranchised children in Sudan, but created the most profound de facto government language policy of its kind as well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".