🇩🇿 As France’s influence in Africa ebbs, Algeria expands English-language learning (1 Viewer)

[Old School]

Schoolchildren attend class in the Ben Omar district of Algiers

More than a year after Algeria launched a pilot program to teach English in elementary schools, the country is hailing it as a success and expanding it in a move that reflects a widening linguistic shift underway in former French colonies throughout Africa.

Students returning to third- and fourth-grade classrooms this fall will participate in two 45-minute English classes each week as the country creates new teacher-training programs at universities and eyes more transformational changes in the years ahead. Additionally, the country is strengthening enforcement of a preexisting law against private schools that operate primarily in French.

"Teaching English is a strategic choice in the country's new education policy," Education Minister Abdelkrim Belabed said recently, lauding the move as an immense success.

English is the world's most widely spoken language, accounts for the majority of content on the internet and remains a lingua franca in business and science. And as France's economic and political influence wanes throughout Africa, Algeria is among a longer list of countries gradually transitioning toward English as their main foreign language.

This year, neighboring Mali changed its constitution to remove French from its list of official languages, and Morocco made English classes compulsory in high schools.

Algeria has more French speakers than all but two nations: France and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nearly 15 million of the country's 44 million people speak it, according to the International Organization of the French Language. Algerian officials frame English classes as a practical rather than political shift, noting the language's importance in scientific and technical fields.

 

[Muji.Iqbal]

English is more important than French.

French is only useful in the former colonies of France.