Multilingual Universities in South Africa

Reflecting Society in Higher Education

Liesel Hibbert, Christa van der Walt

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781783091645
• eBook ISBN: 9781783091676
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Focusing on the use of African languages in higher education, this book showcases South African higher education practitioners' attempts to promote a multilingual ethos in their classes. It is a first-time overview of multilingual teaching and learning strategies that have been tried and tested in a number of higher education institutions in South Africa. Despite language-in-education policies that extol the virtues of multilingualism, practice remains oriented towards English-only learning and teaching. In the multilingual contexts of local campuses, this book shows how students and lecturers attempt to understand their multiple identities and use the available languages to create multilingual learning environments.

Part 1

Policy Development and the Opening up of Implementation Opportunities

1

Biliteracy and Translanguaging Pedagogy in South Africa: An Overview

Liesel Hibbert and Christa van der Walt

This book aims to showcase current multilingual teaching and learning innovations in higher education in South Africa. Although language-in- education policies for multilingual contexts have been in place for some years, and have been discussed and critiqued, there is no overview which highlights the processes and success stories of case studies conducted. We attempt to fill this gap by showcasing work done ‘on the ground’ by higher education practitioners as they develop ways of drawing on all available discourses and languages for strategic and systemically supported multi-lingual and biliteracy development in the formal tertiary education sector.

In the age of wide-scale global migration, language education discourses have been strategically geared for international economic participation, thereby favouring an English-only orientation in most instances. English is perceived as the world's lingua franca (Kim, 2009: 396) and higher education institutions (HEIs) that aspire to international recognition have to manage and plan for this perception. The way in which this happens is mapped out by Ritzen (2004: 39, emphasis added), the erstwhile rector of Maastricht University:

[A]n international university then breaks away from the national ministry; it adopts the medium of English for its education and research; it establishes educational programmes based around issues of social, economic and cultural relevance to the wider international community.

These decisions are increasingly made in Europe (Marginson & Van der Wende, 2007: 5) as well as in South America (Gacel-Ávila et al., 2005), China (Li & Wang, 2010) and India (Amritavalli & Jayaseelan, 2007: 78), to name a few, resulting in bi-/multilingual institutions. In Africa, the use of colonial languages offers a two-in-one solution: such languages act as instruments that should compel a national identity as well as access ready-made educational materials (Muthwii & Kioko, 2004: 2). English plays this role in Anglophone countries, but is also being introduced at HEIs that, in the past, used French, Portuguese and Arabic as languages of learning and teaching (LoLTs). In countries where English has been the LoLT for a long time, as in the USA, Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand, the transnational mobility of students has resulted in campuses becoming increasingly multi-lingual. As noted in van der Walt (2013: 15),

The complexity of multilingual academic environments requires the acknowledgement that academic language itself is a particular variety of a standard language and as such favours those students who use a variety perceived to be close to the high-status LoLT. Furthermore, transnational HE students will already have developed academic literacy in another language as well as a degree of fluency in the LoLT that they will be using at another HEI. They cannot, therefore, be seen as ‘language deficient’ but should rather be seen as emerging bi-literates.

From this brief description, it is clear that higher education is becoming increasingly multilingual as a result of internationalisation drives, the expectations of transnational students and the effects of colonialism. Monolingual language policies or attempts to impose monolingual classroom practices in such an educational landscape can only be seen as relics of a bygone era.

This situation makes for interesting dilemmas in the analysis of localised discursive practices in formal tertiary education. The multilingual practices of students outside formal educational encounters (such as lectures, seminars and tests) find their way into the classroom, where students are able to draw on literacies that they may have developed to a high level at secondary school level. In view of the economic imperatives to improve throughput rates, HEIs can hardly ignore the existing literacies and competencies that students bring to their institutions. The challenge, as indicated by Blackledge and Creese (2010: 206), is to harness existing multilingual practices for pedagogical gain. The concept of translanguaging and its application to higher education classrooms is crucial in this regard.

The concept of translanguaging was first used by Williams (2002: 2) to describe a language practice that is widespread in education and, as he indicates, ‘simply means (i) receiving information in one language and (ii) using or applying it in the other language’. The term is used widely now to cover a variety of multilingual practices, including code-switching, translation and simultaneous interpretation in multilingual classrooms, as the contributions in this book will show. What is important for all higher education practitioners to understand is that such practices will occur whether or not they are mandated by lecturers or policy makers, since students will use the strategies and literacies that they have developed up to that point to further their education. When such strategies are acknowledged and fostered, a climate is created in which languages are seen as resources (Ruiz, 1994) rather than as problems that need to be eliminated. Even when students’ languages are not used for academic purposes, they can still be mobilised to explore and contextualise their academic studies.

In this regard, we argue that discourses in regulated and unregulated spaces, as indicated by Sebba (2007), should be viewed on a continuum, rather than as binary opposites. In this manner, discourses in unregulated spaces can provide scaffolding to support academic discourses, if mobilised strategically. Hornberger's continua of biliteracy (1989, and Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000) provide a useful heuristic by means of which the interplay of languages (inasmuch as they can be enumerated) can be analysed, described and managed. The continua of biliteracy are presented by Hornberger (2007: 184) as sets of interconnected relationships where factors that play a role in multilingual contexts can be plotted on a continuum in terms of the contexts, media, content and development of biliteracy (see Mashiyi in Chapter 9 for a more detailed description). It is important to note that the continua are not limited to educational contexts, but when we interpret them in terms of higher education, they provide clues for the ‘harnessing’ (Blackledge & Creese, 2010: 206) of multilingual practices for pedagogical purposes. The communities within which students communicate on a daily basis, which can range from oral and multilingual at the one end of the continuum to literate and monolingual at the other, provide the two ends of the context of biliteracy continuum. The degree to which students are exposed to or confronted with language(s) is expressed in terms of the two ends of the media of biliteracy, with exposure to more than one language simultaneously at one end and successively at the other. The extent to which languages are available for academic purposes is denoted by the content of biliteracy, where students may move from minority to majority languages, from the vernacular to the literary. The final continuum involves the development of biliteracy, which, in higher education contexts will involve the acquisition of (at least) a second academic literacy as students move from reception to production, starting with the production of oral and then moving to written production, which Airey (2009) refers to as bilingual scientific literacy. At school level, Hornberger (2007: 186) argues that ‘what is needed is attention to oral, multilingual interaction at the micro level of context and to learners’ first language oral, and receptive language skills development (that is, to the traditionally less powerful ends of the continua)’. One implication of this argument is that even minoritised languages that are perceived to require development as academic languages have their place in higher education.

The value of this book is that it provides examples of how such efforts could lead to academic success. We display work that relates not only to the inclusion of African languages in HEIs, informally, but also as languages of learning, and the resultant inter-discursiveness and translanguaging. We also include chapters that demonstrate to what extent the creation of linguistic and social-affinity spaces, including the use of new technologies, benefit language development. In addition, chapters that focus on identity and identification processes in multilingual learning and teaching spaces emphasise the role of language and languages as identity markers.

The book includes a variety of approaches, that is, single-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches that include discourse analysis with all its emanations (critical discourse analysis (CDA), socio-cultural discourse analysis, etc.), interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics, as well as personal reflexive narrative accounts and auto-ethnography.

In an increasingly globalised higher education context, this collection is of interest to higher education practitioners, policy makers and academic development professionals; in fact, to anyone teaching or researching at a linguistically diverse institution of higher learning. As argued previously, the multilingual demands of internationalising drives and the resultant transnational student mobility have created a multilingual higher education landscape – whether existing policies acknowledge this or not. In the South African context, where an ambitious national multilingual Language Policy for Higher Education (2009) is a form of redress for minoritised African languages, HEIs actively attempt to include African languages. The South African case studies thus provide promising glimpses of multilingual pedagogies and practices that can be applied globally, particularly in cases where marginalised languages and communities are struggling to access higher education successfully.

South Africa is not the only country where multilingual learning and teaching is a feature of higher education. Some institutions, particularly those known as ‘historically Afrikaans’, use English and Afrikaans in ways that are similar to strategies used at, for example, the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where German and French are used, or the University of Ottawa, Canada, where French and English are used (see van der Walt, 2013 for a comprehensive overview). What makes South Africa unique, however, is the inclusion of minoritised languages and the fact that languages are not necessarily separated in classrooms. Code-switching, translation and interpreting take place in one classroom, supporting the translanguaging practices that students and lecturers are accustomed to employing outside the classroom too.

English is generally by far the most desirable LoLT globally, which means that a world population of speakers of other languages is accommodated because they are able to mobilise the intellectual skills they have in their primary languages, for academic purposes. At the moment, there are no competing titles and although loose-standing studies have been published in a variety of journals, no collection of South African case studies exists. In this volume, we seek to fill a unique gap in the market by drawing on practices developed locally, rather than drawing on studies from abroad for theory formulation and for the design of case studies, as has been the tradition for South African researchers and lecturers.

Our main aim is to showcase work done by a new generation of academics. The chapters were commissioned in an attempt to showcase practices that are valuable, but invisible, either because of the fairly underdeveloped research culture in some of South Africa's institutions of higher learning, or because of the pervasive conviction that multilingualism is simply a positive spin-off of deficient English language proficiency. We envision that the book will come across as a definite move away from endless policy discussions to cutting-edge experimentation at the interface of social and linguistic realities ‘out there’. In the process, concrete modifications of institutional agendas are proposed in order to meet the challenges of these realities.

The case studies and narratives that follow are examples of bilingual pedagogy in action. Inherent in the conceptualisation of this book, as a whole, are two major points of departure from previous perspectives on the position of African languages, namely:

• A critique of the view of African languages as ‘whole bounded systems’ (as can be seen in the contributions by Kosch and Bosch, Makalela, Madiba and Leeuw);

• An alternative to English-only orientations, by showing how translanguaging and biliteracy promote the motivational, cognitive and linguistic development of students (as described by the abovementioned authors, as well as Maseko, Parmegiani and Rudwick, Ngcobo and Mashiyi).

The Next Generation: Innovation and Development

Studies on the use of language in higher education often focus on the introduction of English as a LoLT or on a deficit view of students’ language proficiency. In this publication, we see language as a resource (Ruiz, 1994) and focus on the introduction of minoritised languages as languages of learning in higher education. In Africa, the debates about home languages in education focus mostly on primary school levels and that is why this book not only highlights the importance of language in mediating complex academic materials, but also makes the role of African languages more visible. As the new generation of South African scholars demonstrates, the increasing diversity in higher education needs to reflect the diversity of languages used by students who did not have access to higher education before the first democratic elections in 1994.

The contributions by these new voices demonstrate both a wide and a narrow focus on multilingual pedagogies, that is, the wide focus on the importance of indigenous languages in education on the one hand, and the particular case studies of transformational classroom practice, on the other hand. The theme that runs through all the contributions in this book is that informal language practices in society need to inform classroom language practices in higher education, not the other way around.

The case studies and narratives show that translanguaging and biliteracy pedagogy significantly influence student performance, that student and lecturer/tutor attitudes are shown as a major variable affecting language development and that Africanisation of content (curriculum transformation, which leads directly to institutional transformation) is a major factor influencing language development of the students.

Significantly improved student performance

Mbulungeni Madiba's chapter focuses on African language glossaries used as scaffol...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part 1: Policy Development and the Opening up of Implementation Opportunities
• Part 2: Enhanced Student Performance through Biliteracy Pedagogy
• Part 3: Affective Aspects of Biliteracy Pedagogy
• Part 4: Africanisation and Localisation of Content for Cultural Identification
• Subject Index