Early Childhood Development of Communicative Competence in Two Urban African Contexts

The study assessed the communicative competencies of 2-3 year-old children, and parental perceptions of influences on their child’s development, in two contrasting neighbourhoods of Zambia’s multilingual capital city, Lusaka: a low-income, high density neighbourhood, and a more affluent low-density area. An adapted version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory was administered individually to each parent. Parents then participated in semi-structured focus group discussions. Parental reports revealed a bilingual or plurilingual lexical repertoire in these young children, with fluid intermingling between English and indigenous Bantu languages, notably ciNyanja, the city’s lingua franca. Alternative methods of scoring the inventory showed that children of affluent families knew more English words, while children of low-income families knew more Bantu language words. The two groups were equal on an overall score that included words known in any language. Recent changes in national educational policy prioritise local language instruction over English. The two groups of parents expressed different attitudes towards this policy, reflecting cultural values and child socialisation practices. Young children in the high-density area were encouraged to play more freely with neighborhood peers. We recommend greater acceptance of linguistic fluidity by early education instructors as a powerful cognitive resource for the growth of communicative competence.