English as a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity

Examining South Africa's Higher Education Crisis

Liesel Hibbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032466330
• eBook ISBN: 9781000916485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Hibbert explores South Africa's higher education crisis utilising case studies and first-hand experiences with English as the language of instruction. The historical overview provides a framework with which to understand the complicated nature of using English as a language of instruction in South Africa, past and present. Student narratives are presented to illustrate mainly breakthroughs, but also challenges.

An overview is provided, of imported English teaching methodologies and how they have emerged and developed in the local educational system over decades. It is demonstrated how these methodologies relate to socio-economic and political events and trends at each juncture. By applying defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation, students' translanguaging struggles are recorded and discussed, both pre-pandemic and in the pandemic period. The experiences of non-monolingual English-speaking staff and students, and of local English/African language bilinguals is foregrounded, as they are by far the majority in South African higher education and schools. The relevance of the experiences and learning paths of those staff and students is enhanced.

This book aids lecturers across disciplines and English language facilitators in the improvement of English acquisition curricula through exposure to arguments, case studies and learning path narratives in this volume, and prompts and inspires researchers to develop further theories and experiments in their own context.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A narrative account of the history of English in South Africa
• 3 Assessing student writing: ‘A tangled situation’
• 4 The complexity of curriculum design for English as a medium of instruction (EMI)
• 5 Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration: Opportunities for relinking
• 6 The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading
• 7 The film Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa and/or ‘being African’ among students in South Africa and the UK
• 8 Developing a transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum
• 9 Cross-disciplinary learning: Radical defamiliarisation in art teaching
• 10 Reflections on teaching for social justice at a South African University of Technology
• 11 Postscript
• Index