Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Setting I 75

communication. A common comment of FRE.LI.X0. members and soldiers
fighting in the liberated areas was that the population there 'accepted
them as sons', although they came from other parts of the country and
didn't speak the same language <Mondlane, 1969). The situation was
different in the towns, but there the Portuguese were still in control,
and FRE.LI.XO. could not involve the population in new modes of social
production, by which new cultural values are developed.

After Independence, the policy was essentially geared towards extending
the experience of the liberated areas to the whole country, as the South
and part of the Centre had no direct experience of war and FRE.LI.KO. was
present there only as underground structure. An intense job of political
mobilization started, carried out in Portuguese whenever possible;
speaking Portuguese was becoming the symbol of political involvement in
the construction of the revolutionary society which abhorred tribalism
and obscurantism (i.e. those aspects of traditional culture that were
considered regressive). Literacy campaigns were launched and there was a
genuine drive to study in ordinary people who had been denied education
for generations. 'Learn', 'school', 'education', 'literacy' meant very much
'learning Portuguese'. Meanwhile, studies were done in the modernization
of African languages, mainly in order to translate new concepts
(Rzewuski,1979), but normally Portuguese words for 'ante-natal clinic',
'comrade', 'cooperative' or 'revolution' were integrated into the local
languages. At the Беіга Seminar in 1975 the decision was taken to discard
the whole colonial syllabus and re-write all the texbooks, but this meant
basically a revision of topics and political outlook, while the
methodology for language teaching continued to be based on the equivocal
assumption that Portuguese was the LI.

The problem of the language of instruction was only addressed at the 1st
Mational Seminar on the Teaching of Portuguese in 1979. On that occasion,
the Minister of Education recognized that Portuguese was the second
language for the great majority of the population and an L2 approach was
to be used in its teaching . The children's mother tongues, however,
would only be used as contrast to explain grammatical and phonetical
differences (Machel,G. 1979). Rather naively, she predicted that the

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