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The policy documents of a country’s education system can provide evidence of that particular country’s vision for its people’s socio-economic, socio-cultural and academic development. Such documents can also say much about the power relations between different languages that might be represented within it. Educators, policy makers, educational leaders, teachers, learners and parents are some key players directly or indirectly affected by these policy documents. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Spolsky’s (2004, 2012) framework for language policy analysis, this paper investigates the trilingual language-in-education policy in the Seychelles National Curriculum Framework (2013) and three Subject Curricula (English, Kreol Seselwa and French), with the aim to explore how the documents relate at the levels of policy planning, implementation and practice. Our findings reveal that there are discrepancies between the overarching Curriculum Framework, where all three national languages are given central roles and equal status, and the Subject Curricula, where clear differences in the power and functions of the languages emerge. Further, on a more pragmatic level, it is of concern that the current policy documents do not explicitly acknowledge the role of the language instruction as a vehicle for learning when describing learning goals and terminal objectives – a good understanding of English (the current L2 medium of instruction) is a prerequisite for succeeding in education. Further, the lack of attention to the question of L2 writing literacy and the fact that Seychellois students have to become fairly advanced English writers at an early age if they want to communicate their knowledge across the curriculum is particularly disconcerting.

This paper builds on Zelime & Deutschmann, 2016, where we examined language ideologies/directives in the Ideological and Formal domains of the curriculum in a multilingual postcolonial context – the Seychelles. Our overall conclusion from this work was that there was a clear mismatch between the roles that different languages were ascribed in these two domains. In this paper we look at manifestations of the Ideological and Formal curricula in the Perceived and Operational domains of the curriculum, more specifically, the language beliefs, attitudes and classroom practices of primary school teachers. We base our findings on questionnaire answers from 142 respondents in 22 primary schools, coupled with classroom observations and teacher interviews. The Seychelles has a fairly typical postcolonial language-in-education system and follows a transitional model of medium of instruction (hereafter MoI). In this system children are taught in Kreol Seselwa (hereafter K.S.), the mother tongue of the vast majority, during the first two years of schooling after which it is replaced by English. Officially, K.S. retains its role as a “support language”, but in reality, controversies surround this practice. Our results indicate that while K.S. plays a central role in the everyday lives of the teachers, they are surprisingly negative to its role in education. The majority want to see it removed altogether and replaced by an English-only model. At the same time most teachers also acknowledge the importance of K.S. as a support language. Using a framework of postcolonial theory, we try to explain this inconsistency.

This study examines the use of Seychelles Creole (hereafter, Kreol Seselwa), and English as languages for testing knowledge in the Social Studies classroom of the Seychelles. The objective of the study was to ascertain whether the languages used in the test affected the pupils' academic performance. The paper is theoretically influenced by the Social Practice approach to writing (Street, 1984), challenging a monolingual (autonomous) approach in favour of a more multilingual (ideological) model which takes into account all the learners' language repertoires. A within groups experimental design was implemented, and 151 primary six pupils (11-12 years) from three different schools wrote a short test, in a counterbalanced design, in two languages. The topic of the test was fishing, mostly local contextual knowledge, taught in English. The tests were marked for content in both languages. The results showed that the scores on both languages highly correlated, indicating that both tests captured the same knowledge constructs. However, pupils achieved significantly higher marks in the tests written in Kreol Seselwa than in English. The study has implications for policymakers, teachers and most importantly learners in other multilingual settings, particularly in post-colonial countries like the Seychelles, where the mother tongue is undervalued in the classroom.

Drawing on evidence from second language medium of instruction (L2 Mol) context (the Seychelles), the objective of the study was to investigate to what extent the choice of language is a factor that influences pupils' writing and their opportunities to incorporate their own knowledge, person, experiences and world views in their school knowledge production. The evidence is based on findings from a corpus of 308 written texts, produced by 154 primary six pupils in the Seychelles in the subject of Social Studies, where each pupil answered the same task under controlled conditions in their native tongue (Kreol Seselwa) and in English (L2 Mol) in a counterbalanced design. Apart from text length, aspects of two metafunctions from Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) were investigated in the analyses, namely 1) the cognitive ideational dimension and 2) the social and interpersonal dimension. With relevance to the ideational dimension, we also looked at how students resorted to code switching to express their ideas. The results of the study show that pupils produced longer texts when writing in Kreol Seselwa and that they code switched more in the English texts. Further, the Kreol Seselwa texts contained far richer vocabulary to describe the semantic domain of the locally contextualised topic of the exercise. It was also evident that pupils used far more first-person pronouns when writing in their mother tongue, indicating a closer engagement with the text than when they wrote in English. The study has implications for policy-makers, teachers and most importantly learners in other multilingual settings, particularly in post-colonial countries like the Seychelles, where the mother tongue is undervalued in the classroom.