| This study explores educator narratives, language perspectives and educational practices in recently implemented bilingual programs in central Mozambique. Home to approximately twenty-two million inhabitants, more than twenty languages coexist in this country. However, Portuguese remains the only official language, a vestige of Mozambique's colonial past. Drawing on postcolonial and poststructural frameworks, I use thematic analysis to investigate language and educational trajectories of teachers, constructions of language legitimacy from teacher perspectives, and language practices in the classroom. Using data including in-depth interviews, participant-observation, and archival documentation, I examine how 13 teachers' life experiences and constructions of self-identity shape attitudes towards language use and policy, and shape implementation of bilingual education in Mozambican schools.;This study shows that multilingual educators, even those from different generations, reproduced a similar repressive mentality towards local languages and their roles in education. Local languages were seen from the teachers' perspectives as appropriate and valuable within informal traditional networks, while Portuguese was appropriate in formal networks associated with modernity and cultural capital. Implications are that national policy alone cannot translate into meaningful changes in implementation at the local level as long as teachers' beliefs prevent appropriate adoption of bilingual curriculum.;This study contributes to the broader multilevel qualitative analysis of postcolonial countries with multiple indigenous populations and diverse language environments. The interdisciplinary nature of this study, spanning the fields of applied linguistics and education, contributes to broader understandings of how language, culture, and identities intersect with educational policies and practices to impact educational possibilities for diverse learners in linguistically and culturally complex global contexts. |
