Department of Education

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Pierre de Galbert

Visiting Assistant Professor
pierre_degalbert@brown.edu
Arnold Lab, 91 Waterman Street, Room 416
Fall 2024 Office Hours Tues 9:30-11am

Biography

Pierre de Galbert is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University in the education department. His research focuses on language of instruction policies in low- and middle-income countries, and the association between language policies and learning in the early years of formal school. He is particularly interested in the multi-dimensional set of factors that influence both the language policy decisions and their implementation. He is also interested in educational measurement, specifically focusing on literacy acquisition in non-dominant languages.

Recent News

JULACE: Journal of the University of Namibia Language Centre

Namibia in its thirties: Reviewing the choice of English as sole official language

Namibia is a linguistically diverse country that attained independence in 1990. One of the most significant policy decisions at the time was to remove Afrikaans as one of the official languages, recognizing English only. In this paper, Kristof Iipinge (University of Namibia) and Pierre de Galbert (Brown University) critically review the criteria used to justify this decision and argue that the choice of these criteria, and the “value” attributed to European languages, compared with that of Namibian languages, were biased in a way to support the monolingual English policy.
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