N°020_Vol.2_19

Introduction:  English as a Foreign Language (EFL) encounters challenges in the educational system of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These difficulties are due not only to the limited exposure of EFL learners to the target language but also to the multilingual status of the country. In fact, the Democratic Republic of Congo has over two hundred local languages spoken there, in addition to French, which is both an official language and a medium of education. Colonialist students studying in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were the target audience for the language to be equivalent to their classmates living in Europe. Hence, despite the complexity of the situation, monolingual pedagogy was chosen in EFL learning (MUYAYA, 2022), (TEMBUE, 2024). The metropolitan program continued during the independence to the extent that Congolese educational officials could not keep up with it. The monolingual technique is still used today. The truth is that secondary school students’ ability to understand, speak, read, and write English correctly at the end of the cycle was one of the goals allocated to EFL instruction in the first national English curriculum, designed in 1982. Even now, after a considerable amount of time, these goals remain unfulfilled (Bank, 2005); (WETSHOKODI, 2022); (TEMBUE, 2024). Thus, monolingual education has been a complete failure.

A different strategy is required, one that considers the nation’s multilingual environment. In this case, translanguaging is an alternative to monolingualism, which I will discuss in this paper entitled “Translanguaging as an Alternative to Monolingual Approach to TEFL in DR Congo.” The paper aims at how translanguaging pedagogy is an appropriate approach to teaching a foreign language like English successfully in a multilingual environment, as in DR Congo, instead of monolingualism. The implementation of translanguaging raises questions about the possible advantages and disadvantages of teaching a second language, particularly in light of a multilingual society where French is the official language. The study is motivated by two questions: What is the effect of the monolingual system on the teaching of English in the Democratic Republic of Congo and how could translanguaging be a better alternative? 2. What are the challenges of English teachers’ translanguaging pedagogy in DR Congo’s classrooms, and what strategies can be used to tackle these challenges? These questions present the historical problem and the practical dimension of pedagogical innovation. These are the study hypotheses. It is hypothesised that the historical monolingual approach has limited the effectiveness of English language teaching in the Congolese context but that translanguaging is a more efficacious alternative through the use of the learners’ multilingual resources. There are also challenges in the implementation of translanguaging pedagogy, such as teacher resistance, lack of training, and institutional constraints, but the use of purposeful strategies such as professional development, curriculum adaptation, and stakeholder sensitisation can mitigate these challenges. The research questions and hypotheses form a coherent problem-solution frame that undergirds the investigation and situates translanguaging as a sustainable way of doing TEFL in the Democratic Republic of Congo.