Journal articles on the topic 'English language – Rwanda'

English, as global language, has had great influence over most languages of the world for nearly two centuries now. The expansion of English is no exception in Rwanda, though. For the last two decades, the importance of English has been felt in the day to day activities of Rwanda. English became a third official language in Rwanda just after the 1994 genocide and a compulsory language of instruction since January 2009. This paper discusses the use of English in post-genocide Rwanda and its impact on French, over a borrowing one, Kinyarwanda and French. English has risen sharply for the last two decades because of the will of the Rwandan government to find ways of communicating with the external world in a more powerful language, English, than the previously predominant one, French. It also highlights major domains where English speaks of its strength and the factors that led to the spread of English.

The aim of this article is to assess whether the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) is likely to upgrade the status of English by constitutional or educational means. Indeed, neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Burundi adopted English as their official language in 1996 and 2014, but less writing in English is devoted to a potential linguistic transition in DR Congo, the most populous French-speaking country. This article will gauge DR Congo and Rwanda against the four criteria that arguably triggered Rwanda’s switch-to-English: historical factors in current linguistic trends; the role of charismatic leaders in sudden language policy changes; language-in-education policies; and economic incentives. The results of this interdisciplinary investigation into the language dynamics of the Great Lakes region indicate that, reflecting the vehicles of DR Congo’s domestic and regional evolutions, its leaders might be tempted to enhance the status of English as an official language in a way that, contrary to Rwanda’s radical switch-to-English, is more compatible with other languages.

Employers in Rwanda have been expressing their dissatisfaction with university graduates’ low English proficiency affirming that it hindered their performance at work. Rwanda Development Board (RDB) also noticed that the English proficiency and work readiness skills of university graduates on internship in 2019 left a lot to be desired, which was an impediment to the completion of the internship and to the development of their professional skills. To enhance these graduates’ communication and work readiness skills, the Rwandan Government, through RDB, sent them to a one and half-month employability boot camp at the University of Rwanda. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating factors that hindered these interns’ development of English proficiency and at exploring whether the course helped improve their skills in this language. For the sake of validity and reliability, both qualitative and quantitative research paradigms were applied to collect and analyse the research data. Themes emerging from classroom observations and interviews were analysed inductively and figures used to interpret the trainees’ results in the entry and exit English proficiency tests. Research findings revealed that unfavorable linguistic environment, teachers limited English proficiency, and regular shifts in the medium of instruction were major impediments to the trainees' improvement of English proficiency. Findings also disclosed that the training had helped the majority of participants boost the four language macro modalities, but that more time was required for slow learners. In agreement with the findings, some recommendations were made on how to effectively support Rwandan students’ learning of English.

En 2009, le Rwanda, ancienne colonie belge et pays francophone, passe officiellement et sans états d’âme « de Voltaire à Shakespeare » ( Ouazani), en s’affiliant au Commonwealth, au terme d’ un intense lobbying auprès des membres influents de ce club réservé essentiellement aux anciennes colonies britanniques. L’anglais devient langue unique de formation du primaire à l’université, reléguant ainsi le français au rang de simple langue seconde parmi tant d’autres proposées dans les programmes de formation publique ou privée. Eu égard à cette quête de changement d’alliances, d’autres pays tels que le Gabon, le Burundi, le Madagascar seraient des exemples intéressants à examiner, mais nous proposons de nous concentrer sur le cas particulier et sans précédent du Rwanda. En jetant un regard critique sur certains aspects de l’entreprise coloniale belge notamment sa stratégie éducative, nous tenterons de montrer que le déclin du français, c’est-à-dire sa perte de statut de langue officielle et peut-être un jour sa disparition pure et simple comme langue d’usage par les Rwandais, était programmé d’avance, inscrit non seulement dans les gènes mêmes de son implantation par l’autorité coloniale belge, il y a environ un siècle de cela, mais surtout dans la singularité du contexte farouchement et exclusivement monolingue du Rwanda traditionnel ; que même si le rebond de la langue française n’est pas impossible, le chemin est parsemé d’obstacles presque infranchissables, en raison de la nouvelle donne géostratégique, linguistique du Rwanda et une politique économique axée sur les nouvelles technologies de l’information où l’anglais reste prédominant. 
 
 Abstract
 
 In 2009, Rwanda, former belgian colony and francophone country, switches, in Ouazani’s terms, from Voltaire to Shakespeare, becoming officially and unapologetically affiliated with the Commonwealth, after intensely lobbying the influential members of that club, whose membership is essentially composed of former british colonies. English become the sole language of instruction from elementary school to university, while French joined the rank of other optional second languages taught in both public and private institutions. Although some other countries like Gabon, Burundi and Madagascar, which are apparently tempted by the same affiliation, are interesting cases in point, I will rather focus on this singular and unprecedented shift operated by Rwanda. By pointing out some aspects of the belgian colonial enterprise, particularly its instruction rationale and strategies, I will attempt to argue that the actual decline of French - its loss of the status of official language and, perhaps, its pure and simple disappearance in Rwanda one day- was programmed in advance, written not only in the very genes of its colonial inception a century ago, but also in the nationalistic context of traditional Rwanda with its prevailing and self-sufficent monolingualism. I shall also point out that even though the rebirth of French language is not impossible, the path remains mined by daunting obstacles, related to the new geostrategic and linguistic road Rwanda has taken, as well as the actual government’ economic plan, centered on information technologies in which English is predominant.

In the summer of 1981, the author was engaged in pedagogicalresearch in language program development for the governments of Senegaland The Gambia. During that period, he further participated in an eight countrylanguage teaching survey throughout West, Central, and EastAfrica, under the sponsorship of the United States International CommunicationsAgency. Included in that survey was an analysis of the useof radio broadcasts as a means to teach foreign languages. This articlewill describe the language-by-radio programs in four countries, i.e.,Senegal, Burundi, Rwanda, and Kenya. Of special interest is the use ofradio to teach English.

The purpose of this paper is to report about how teachers of English in Rwanda implement Grice’s cooperative principle in their classrooms, the challenges they face while implementing it, and how they deal with those challenges. The study upon which this paper is based used survey questionnaires, observations, and interviews as methods of data collection. Grounded theory analysis was employed to make sense of the data. Research findings are articulated according to four maxims including quantitative maxim, qualitative maxim, maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner. They include the fact that teachers struggle with teaching the prescribed curriculum, communicating with students in English, and teaching what is at their students’ learning level. The paper concludes by devising implications of the findings for policy and practice.

This contribution focuses on the study of Linguistic Landscapes in the Central/Western African state of Cameroon, with particular reference to its capital, Yaoundé. Linguistic landscapes is a relatively recent area of research, and can be broadly defined as the visual representation of languages in public space. This paper will show that the field of linguistic landscapes can act as a reflection of linguistic hierarchies, ideologies and acts of resistance in multilingual and multicultural communities. At the same time, the sociolinguistic situation in the country will be investigated, which is paramount to understanding the linguistic and ideological conflicts between the anglophone minority and the francophone government. Cameroon’s linguistic landscape will be explored via the various spaces that English, French, Pidgin English, Camfranglais and, to a minor degree, indigenous African languages occupy in its sociolinguistic composition. The methodological design is quantitative in nature, involving collecting more than 600 linguistic tokens (digital photos) in various public places mainly in and around the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé. It will be demonstrated that the deployment of languages on signs and linguistic tokens, apart from serving informative and symbolic functions for the audiences or passers-by they target, also has social and political implications in an ethnically heterogeneous and linguistically hybrid society such as Cameroon. Whereas in some other former British colonies there are indications that the public space is being symbolically constructed in order to preserve some of Africa’s indigenous languages (e.g. in Botswana, Rwanda, Tanzania), in Cameroon the linguistic landscape almost exclusively focuses on the dominant status and role of one single language, i.e. French, and to a lesser extent English, whose speakers therefore feel marginalized and oppressed by the French government.

Students frequently commit errors despite spending huge amount of time studying language. This paper discusses a classroom-based teaching inquiry about error analysis and correction. The study focused on the use of simple past in paragraphs. The objectives of the investigation were to understand the extent to which dealing with students’ errors in a leaner-centered classroom improves accuracy in English and to assess students’ attitudes to the approach in language learning. The inquiry involved 62 first-year students from the College of Agriculture, Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Rwanda. Individual and group work, a questionnaire and class observations were data collection tools. Findings revealed that the majority of students significantly improved their writing as a result of analyzing their errors in written work. In addition, students reported that correcting errors together gave them confidence and freedom to explore their language use more freely, to discuss their errors, to learn new words in their field of study, and to avoid repeating error while writing. Class observations showed that students were discussing and listening to each other’s opinions attentively and critically. The researchers concluded that students acquire more language accuracy when they are deeply involved in error analysis as they feel motivated and responsible for their own learning.

Purpose Measurement of the quality of cancer care is essential for quality improvement and is widely implemented in oncology programs in high-income countries. Growing efforts are being made to measure care quality in emerging cancer care delivery systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This will require the development of measures that are clinically important, actionable, relevant to existing resources, and feasible to routinely evaluate. As part of a project to develop resource-adapted quality measures for Rwanda and other LMICs, we conducted a systematic review of the literature to identify published quality measures for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Methods We performed a literature search in accordance with PRISMA guidelines using the following terms in PubMed: ‘breast cancer’ and ‘quality indicator,’ ‘quality measure,’ or ‘quality metric’; and the following MeSH terms: ‘breast neoplasms’ and ‘healthcare quality indicator.’ We included English-language articles published before August 2017 that described the systematic identification of process measures for breast cancer diagnosis or treatment through literature review, clinical validation, and/or expert panel determination. We directly searched the Web sites of prominent cancer care organizations to identify additional publicly available measures. Income level was classified using World Bank definitions. Results We identified 521 published quality measures, including 419 measures from 27 peer-reviewed journal articles and 102 measures from the Web sites of national and international cancer care organizations. Twenty-five peer-reviewed publications (93%) originated from high-income countries, one from an upper-middle income country (People’s Republic of China), and one from the international Breast Health Global Initiative with process measures to assess the phased implementation of breast cancer services. No resources or articles other than that from the Breast Health Global Initiative provided suggestions for adapting measures to limited resources. Conclusion A large number of quality measures for breast cancer care have been identified and published in high-income countries; however, no breast cancer care quality measures have been systematically developed and validated for use in settings where resource limitations crucially affect care delivery and measurement feasibility. We are collaborating with clinicians in LMICs and global breast cancer experts to develop and validate quality measures that will enable quality improvement initiatives in Rwanda and other emerging cancer care delivery systems. AUTHORS' DISCLOSURES OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST The following represents disclosure information provided by authors of this manuscript. All relationships are considered compensated. Relationships are self-held unless noted. I = Immediate Family Member, Inst = My Institution. Relationships may not relate to the subject matter of this manuscript. For more information about ASCO's conflict of interest policy, please refer to www.asco.org/rwc or ascopubs.org/jco/site/ifc . No COIs from the authors.

While English is an official language and holds a significant role in education not only as a medium of instruction but also a subject of study from primary to tertiary level in Rwandan education system, some students still stick on their mother tongue in academic environment and this impedes language education and quality education as a whole. Based on Communicative approach, this study explored students’ perceptions of using a second language in a mother tongue dominated environment. The study involved 36 Diploma students from language education combinations. Questionnaire was used for data collection. Analysis revealed that mother tongue environment affects second language use. It was recommended that efforts be made to practice and improve their English language for effective communication.

The article offers a concise presentation of the project linked to the Library Fund of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, namely, to study the inculturation of the Christian faith by relating the documentation on the editions of the Bible to the catechisms in the territories entrusted to the pastoral care of the Congregation for Evangelization of peoples. The vastness of the project itself is marked today by the difficulty of using more extensive documentation than that present in the Fund of the same Library. However, more limited segments of the indicated material of interest can already be identified. More specifically, the African continent shows quite a varied phenomenology of the editions of the Bible: from translations of the Latin Vulgate into local languages, to translations from English or French, themselves translations from Latin. In the post-conciliar period, the translations of the Bible from the original biblical languages emerge. This is the case of the Kinyarwanda versions of the NT (1988, 1989) and of the OT-NT in a single volume (1990, 1992), in which, alongside pastoral purposes, the results of modern biblical exegesis are evident, to the point of proposing categorizations of literary bodies of biblical literature from an interconfessional and also interreligious perspective.

SummaryThe statutes of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and for the Former Yugoslavia give these tribunals jurisdiction over murder as a crime against humanity. Yet the judges of these tribunals have often found themselves disagreeing as to the level means rea required for conviction. The controversy results from the French text that employs the term “assassinat” in the place where the English text speaks of “murder.” Assassinat is equivalent only to the premeditated kind of murder. This has led some of the judges to insist that no mens rea lower than premeditation is sufficient for conviction for murder as a crime against humanity under the statutes of the ICTR and the ICTY. It is suggested in this article that neither the requirements of international criminal law nor a contextual reading of the statutes truly favours such a strict view of murder as a crime against humanity, which effectively excludes a wide range means rea, which will, but for the use of the term “assassinat” in the French text, properly anchor a conviction for murder.

<p>The language policy in Rwanda states that English is the medium of Instruction (MOI) to be used in the Education system following the 2008 Language shift. However, this change in the MOI brought about extreme challenges to both Rwandan teachers and learners. Moreover, the extensive day to day usage of Kinyarwanda, the local dialect, has greatly inhibited the use of English. This has adversely obstructed the use of the English language as a MOI and the curriculum implementation for over 20 years hence adversely affecting the teaching and learning process. The proficiency of the teachers who are meant to teach in the MOI is quite questionable; many realize the need to learn English while teaching or risk unemployment. As such, this study purposed to examine the teacher competency and teaching styles in use of English as a MOI in facilitating curriculum implementation in rural primary schools in Rwanda. Guided by the inter language theory and the Discrepancy theory, the study applied a descriptive survey research design. With a target population of 3,269, the study entailed a sample of 1470 randomly selected learners from Primary 4 to Primary 6, teachers and head teachers from 21 schools. The study used questionnaires, interviews, and observation to collect primary data. The study found that the teachers’ competency in using English language as MOI had significant influence on curriculum implementation in rural primary schools in Muhanga district and in the entire republic of Rwanda. The teaching styles factors positively and significantly influence the use of MOI in curriculum implementation when other factors are held constant.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0807/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Research findings pertaining to language education and distance education point to the lack of online reading materials written in African languages and reflecting African contexts. Such a shortage is a challenge to literacy skills development in Africa. In Rwanda, although there are some graded readers to support the teaching of reading in Kinyarwanda, there is a shortage of enjoyable storybooks on which children can practice their reading skills. This paper contributes to addressing this challenge by investigating the partnership between the University of Rwanda-College of Education and South African Institute of Distance Education’s (Saide) African Storybook Initiative, which provides a website of digital storybooks in Kinyarwanda and other languages for early grade reading. Data were collected from 32 Rwandan teacher educators who participated in a workshop. Participants created online picture storybooks in Kinyarwanda, translated some from other languages and published them on the African Storybook website. The researchers firstly observed their activities during the workshop, then, all participants filled in the questionnaire and ten teachers were interviewed on opportunities offered and challenges encountered during the translation process. The key finding is that teachers’ experiences with translation revealed differences in story reading levels between the original Kinyarwanda folktales and English translated versions. They found special features of African agglutinating languages in determining reading levels, and foreignization of translated stories based on cultural clashes. Differences in length between the original and the translated stories were observed, as well as the specificity of English versions in reinforcing more critical thinking than the translated Kinyarwanda versions. The paper recommends teacher educators and translators to bear in mind that adaptation to African languages requires care and a high level of ability to maintain the meaning and moral lesson of the original tale and make it enjoyable for children. Translating and adapting stories from English into agglutinative African languages have implications for early grade reading interventions in African schools since children stories on African storybook website are available in more than 100 African languages.

Background: Writing is among the most important skills, and globally it has received more emphasis in literature on language teaching than reading, speaking and listening. However, a paucity of studies is observed in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in contexts where English is being taught as an additional or foreign language, as is the case in Rwanda. Research shows that learners who can write well in different genres and for different purposes tend to do well in all curriculum subjects and subsequently beyond school education. The key challenges are the inadequacy of materials and teachers’ inability to teach writing well, especially through distance education programmes.Objectives: This study investigates the effectiveness of materials used at the University of Rwanda-College of Education’s Distance Education programme to train high school teachers on writing pedagogy for English teaching.Method: The study adopted a qualitative approach to report on the findings from textual, document analysis of distance education materials, argumentative essays and focus group discussions with 80 of 599 in-service teachers, who responded to designed and redesigned sections on writing pedagogy.Results: The findings indicate that teachers’ knowledge and skills in both writing and writing pedagogy are not addressed effectively by the materials designed. This negatively affected the quality of their own writing abilities and those of their students.Conclusion: The article recommends reconceptualisation of distance education materials to equip in-service teachers with propositional knowledge and procedural knowledge on writing pedagogy.

One of the most significant extant documents attesting to the dissemination of genocide ideology in Rwanda in the early 1990s is the speech delivered on 22 November 1992 by the political figure Léon Mugesera, a member of the incumbent MRND party. It is particularly significant because it constitutes the earliest example of explicit genocidal discourse expressed by a member of the ruling political party in a public forum, and as such it has often been regarded as offering a ‘blueprint’ for the practical implementation of the genocide. In addition, the contents of the speech have been the subject of intense scrutiny and heated debate within the framework of a judicial process in Canada spanning more than a decade to determine whether Mugesera should be deported to Rwanda to face prosecution for genocide.
 
 The original speech was delivered in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, which effectively meant it was largely inaccessible to foreign commentators until it was translated into French and English. This article examines key thematic, lexical and stylistic elements within the original speech as it was heard by its target audience, as well as fundamental issues raised by the Canadian hearings relating to the translation process such as accuracy, fidelity, impartiality and subjectivity which were crucial elements in the decision-making process which finally led to Mugesera being deported to Rwanda on 23 January 2012.

Abstract Background Despite reaching Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) is still high in Rwanda. Most deaths occur after transfer of patients with obstetric complications from district hospitals (DHs) to referral hospitals; timely detection and management may improve these outcomes. The RI and MEOWS tool has been designed to predict morbidity and decrease delay of transfer. Our study aimed: 1) to determine if the use of the RI and MEOWS tool is feasible in DHs in Rwanda and 2) to determine the role of the RI and MEOWS tool in predicting morbidity. Methods A cross-sectional study enrolled parturient admitted to 4 district hospitals during the study period from April to July 2019. Data was collected on completeness rate (feasibility) to RI and MEOWS tool, and prediction of morbidity (hemorrhage, infection, and pre-eclampsia). Results Among 478 RI and MEOWS forms used, 75.9% forms were fully completed suggesting adequate feasibility. In addition, the RI and MEOWS tool showed to predict morbidity with a sensitivity of 28.9%, a specificity of 93.5%, a PPV of 36.1%, a NPV of 91.1%, an accuracy of 86.2%, and a relative risk of 4.1 (95% Confidential Interval (CI), 2.4–7.1). When asked about challenges faced during use of the RI and MEOWS tool, most of the respondents reported that the tool was long, the staff to patient ratio was low, the English language was a barrier, and the printed forms were sometimes unavailable. Conclusion The RI and MEOWS tool is a feasible in the DHs of Rwanda. In addition, having moderate or high scores on the RI and MEOWS tool predict morbidity. After consideration of local context, this tool can be considered for scale up to other DHs in Rwanda or other low resources settings. Trial registration This is not a clinical trial rather a quality improvement project. It will be registered retrospectively.

Uganda lies in the heart of Sub-Saharan Africa. It is situated in East Africa and occupies an area of 241,038 sq km (roughly twice the size of the state of Pennsylvania) and its population is about 35,873,253 (CIA World Factbook, 2012). Uganda is bordered by Tanzania and Rwanda to the south, Democratic Republic of Congo to the west, South Sudan to the north, and Kenya to the east. Uganda is a landlocked country and occupies most of the Lake Victoria Basin, which was formed by the geological shifts that created the Rift Valley during the Pleistocene era. Uganda was a British colony and became an independent- sovereign nation in 1962 without a bloody struggle. Several ethnic groups reside in the country i.e. Baganda, Banyankole, Bahima, Bakiga, Bunyoro, Batoro, Basoga, Bagisu, Langi, Acholi, Lugbara, Karamojong and others. English is the official language by virtue of Article 6(1) of the 1995 Constitution and Swahili is also widely spoken especially in the urban areas. Uganda has no State religion. As a country, Uganda has witnessed some positive development in the area of security. The government managed to plant the seeds of peace in the north by defeating the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony.

Various studies on literacy have been conducted worldwide, but there is paucity of studies that explored adult literacy from the perspectives of African traditional values. Many African communities, including Rwanda, still experience a low level of literacy in the 21st century. As a contribution to address this literacy gap, an innovative model coined “Eclectic Traditional Value Hub Model” is being implemented in selected Rwandan rural communities to promote quadriliteracy, community literacy and digital literacy among adults with limited literacy. The newness of this model is twofold: firstly, it draws from a range of African and Rwandan traditional values; secondly, it boosts parallel literacy practices in four languages, namely Kinyarwanda, English, French and Kiswahili, by which it is described as “Four-in-One”. This study reports on one year’s implementation of this model, exploring its level of success in accelerating quadriliteracy and community digital literacy and numeracy among Rwandan communities. Participants include University of Rwanda lecturers who initiated the model, graduates from secondary schools who are literacy trainers in their local communities and trainees who are citizens with limited literacy including motorists, street vendors, small-sized business people and others who strive to uplift their literacy levels. The successful stride of this model is that about ten thousand community members from Eastern province are accelerating their literacy practices through translingual and cross-lingual practices. We recommend the application of this model to other African settings with more African traditional values and assess its impact in minimising the high illiteracy rate reported in various corners of Africa.

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. 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