Burkinabe French

When I tell people that I'm in Africa teaching math in French, people's reaction is always as follows: You're teaching math in French? How's that going? It combines many of Americans' worst nightmares, you see: math and foreign languages. Well, French is not the problem for me. My French is still far from perfect, but I speak so much more French than the average villager that I feel it doesn't actually get me that far outside of the classroom. Maybe half the people in my village can speak French at an okay level, more men than women. A surprising number of people don't seem to know that the response to "bonjour" is just "bonjour." I say "bonjour" to them and they shift uneasily and respond with an uncomfortable "uh hm!"

The lack of French abilities on the Burkinabe side makes teaching a lot more difficult. First of all, if the student's parents don't speak French, it means that they really can't give their kid any academic support. Primary school is taught in a mixture of local language and French, but secondary school is only in French. Teachers can get into trouble for giving explanations in Moore. My math students are in their second year of secondary school (like 7th grade), and most of them get by in French, but a lot of them are still really terrible at it. Sometimes I give explanations that should be extremely simple, but half the class still doesn't get it. If they understood the language, there's no way they couldn't understand.

I did a recent unit on fractions, and it was the first time I used word problems with my class. They could. not. do word problems. I explained them over and over but they still didn't get it. Part of the problem is definitely the fact that they are just resistant to having to think about how to solve a problem instead of mindlessly cranking out calculations. But there's more to it than that. On the last test I had a question "I have a bag of 50 candies. I eat half of them. How many candies are left?" Responses were all over the map, including things like "There are 49/2 candies left." or "There are 10 mangoes left." (An actual response. No idea where some of those numbers came from. Or mangoes.) A follow-up question was "I give 1/5 of the remaining candies to my sister. What fraction of the original bag did I give her?" That one really confused them. A lot of people responded with variations on "I gave my sister 10 candies fraction of the bag." or "I did to give 99/50 fraction of candies to her."

If that's your French level, I can't really blame you for hating math because you think it's impossible to understand.


Even at its best, Burkinabe French has some funny quirks that separate it from French French. They got me confused for awhile. For example, in France, "soir" means evening, thus you greet people with bonjour all day until the late afternoon, when you start bonsoiring. So when I arrived here, I greeted people with bonjour at 3 pm and they laughed at me like I was nuts. Mais c'est le soir, Mariko! Crazy foreigner. Bonsoir starts at 12:01 pm. They don't use the word après-midi, French for afternoon, at all. Students studying English seem to have trouble with the distinction. I've gotten a lot of good evenings while I was on my way to prepare lunch.

Another one that still gets me are the words devoir and examen. In France, devoir means homework assignment, and examen means test. But here, devoir means test and examen can be either a major examination or a medical exam. If you want to give students homework, it's exercices de maison, house exercises. Sometimes I still accidentally tell students they have a devoir due tomorrow, leading to much upset all around. But really I don't understand why they use devoir like that. I don't see how someone wouldn't have fixed that mistranslation before it got stuck. But there it is.

And then there's the word interessant, interesting. Shortly after I arrived at site, I made crepes and shared them with some people I knew who had never had crepes before. The reaction all around was "c'est interessant." It's interesting? At home, I would be so upset if everyone's reaction to something I cooked for them was "it's interesting" and that was it. They always said it really slowly with an unreadable expression. Well no more crepes for you! On another occasion, I told someone I had walked to a nearby river by myself and he told me that it wasn't interessant. Dude, why would you tell me my story wasn't interesting? Then another day, someone told a story about how 3 people died in a motorcycle accident and it wasn't interessant. What? People died and it wasn't interesting? It took me about 4 months in country to finally figure out that in the dialect the word "interesting" means good. It explained so much. I haven't yet figured out an appropriate substitute for the word interesting to tell someone that I have no interest in something.


I feel that the Burkinabe really need to learn a second language to allow free communication across ethnic groups, as well as to give them a boost on communication with the outside world. At the same time, though, how much is it really worth letting students' comprehension of all other subjects suffer until they start getting a grasp on French 3 or 4 years later?