Bamanankan language as a support to access French language at the first cycle of basic school in Mali: the case of the basic school in Fana.; [LE BAMANANKAN COMME APPUI À L’ACCÈS AU FRANÇAIS AU PREMIER CYCLE DE L’ENSEIGNEMENT FONDAMENTAL AU MALI: CAS DE L’ÉCOLE FONDAMENTALE DE FANA]

The introduction of national languages – Bamanankan in this case – into the Malian educational system, called “basic education curriculum”, has been conceived by the school administration as an alternative to traditional education which used French as the only vehicle in contexts where no family has French as the first language. This traditional conception has been viewed as one of the factors accounting for failure and dropping out of school, and even for general low-level competence in French. To bridge the gap between the knowledge acquired in the family in preschool years, and the successive school demands, national languages have been recently introduced at school. Far from neglecting French, which nowadays is added to the list of African and therefore Malian languages, the basic education curriculum introduced in the early 2000s supports the acquisition of literacy in the first language of learners, which helps them gradually evolve towards French. It is the mother tongue that guarantees the intellectual take-off of the child at the beginning of the schooling process. In this article, after a brief analysis of the basic education curriculum in Mali, it will be shown how, through classroom practices, teachers lean on Bamanankan to help learners gradually access French meanings. © 2023 Fabrizio Serra Editore Srl. All rights reserved.