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.
This collection highlights research conducted by academics from the fields of science and English language studies. The contributions gathered here bring out the importance of using a translanguaging approach to teaching subject content. The volume responds to the generally agreed custom among academics that translanguaging should only be used by language teachers and lecturers. The practical descriptions of how translanguaging has been, and can be, used in science and maths classrooms show that translanguaging pedagogy should not be a tool to be used by language lecturers only. The volume shows that there are emerging perspectives with regards to teaching maths and science where translingual pedagogy can be used as a vehicle towards assisting students to understand difficult academic concepts.
This collection of the proceedings of the 3rd conference on bi- and multilingual universities, held at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano from 20 to 22 September 2007, tries to give a state-of-the-art insight into theoretical and practical approaches towards implementing bi- and multilingual models and policies in higher education institutions in various parts of the world.
An in-depth look at the changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. To date, there has been no published textbook which takes into account changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication breaks new ground in this arena. The scope of this book ranges from macro-sociolinguistic questions pertaining to language policies and their implementation (or non-implementation) to micro-sociolinguistic observations of actual language-use in verbal interaction, mainly in multilingual contexts of Higher Education (HE). There is a gradual move for the study of language and culture to be taught in the context of (professional) disciplines in which they would be used, for example, Journalism and African languages, Education and African languages, etc. The book caters for this growing market. Because of its multilingual nature, it caters to English and Afrikaans language speakers, as well as the Sotho and Nguni language groups _ the largest languages in South Africa [and also increasingly used in the context of South African Higher Education]. It brings together various inter-linked disciplines such as Sociolinguistics and Applied Language Studies, Media Studies and Journalism, History and Education, Social and Natural Sciences, Law, Human Language Technology, Music, Intercultural Communication and Literary Studies. The unique cross-cutting disciplinary features of the book will make it a must-have for twenty-first century South African students and scholars and those interested in applied language issues.
This book critically and reflectively engages with the ‘Language Problem’ in the contemporary multilingual university. It paints a complex picture of the lived multilingual realities of teachers and students in universities across geographies such as Pakistan, Timor-Leste, South Korea, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Afghanistan, Fiji, Colombia, and the UK (including Northern Ireland) and focuses on three overall analytic themes: language and colonial epistemologies, language policies and practices, and language and research. Globalisation, global knowledge economy, and neoliberal governance has significantly impacted higher education by elevating colonial languages, particularly English, to a global academic lingua franca. Universities now collaborate and compete globally, with English emerging as the dominant language for education and research. The imposition, or uncritical adoption, of English poses profound political, cultural, and epistemic challenges for those who have to use the language in everyday university administration, research, and teaching and also intertwines with issues of race, gender, coloniality, and social class. This volume addresses this as higher education’s multifaceted Language Problem which requires interdisciplinary collaboration and critical debate, and ultimately aims towards understanding multilingualism in higher education across both the Global North and South. The contributions to this book continue to remind us of the coloniality of language and of the linguistic stratification that governs epistemological structures and power relations in the academy. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and practitioners of higher education, applied linguistics, education policy and politics, and sociology of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this growing area, the linguistic analysis of interaction in superdiverse cities. Developed as a descriptive term to account for the increasingly stratified processes and effects of migration in Western Europe, ‘superdiversity’ has the potential to contribute to an enhanced understanding of mobility, complexity, and change, with theoretical, practical, global, and methodological reach. With seven sections edited by leading names, the handbook includes 35 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. The handbook adopts a truly interdisciplinary approach, covering: Cultural heritage Sport Law Education Business and entrepreneurship. The result is a truly comprehensive account of how people live, work and communicate in superdiverse spaces. This volume is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of Language and Superdiversity within Applied Linguistics, Linguistic Anthropology and related areas.
This book examines the intersections between education, identity formation, and language in post-apartheid South Africa with specific attention to higher education. It does so against the backdrop of the core argument that the sector plays a critical role in shaping, (re)producing and perpetuating sectoral, class, sub-national and national identities, which in turn, in the peculiar South African setting, are almost invariably analogous with the historical fault lines determined and dictated by language as a marker of ethnic and racial identity. The chapters in the book grapple with the nuances related to these intersections in the understanding that higher education language policies – overt and/or covert – largely structure institutional cultures, or what has been described as curriculum in higher education institutions. Together, the chapters examine the roles played by higher education, by language policies, and by the intersections of these policies and ethnolinguistic identities in either constructing and perpetuating, or deconstructing ethnolinguistic identities upon which the sector was founded. The introductory chapter lays out the background to the entire book with an emphasis on the policy and practice perspectives on the intersections. The middle chapters describe the so-called “White Universities”, “Black Universities” and “Middle-Man Minorities Universities”. The final chapter maps out future directions of the discourses on language and identity formation in South Africa’s higher education.
The appointment of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa in 1994 signalled the end of apartheid and transition to a new democratic constitution. This book studies discursive trends during the first twenty years of the new democracy, outlining the highlights and challenges of transforming policy, practice and discursive formations. The book analyses a range of discourses which signal how and by what processes the linguistic landscape and identities of South Africa’s inhabitants have changed in this time, finding that struggles in South African politics go hand in hand with shifts in the linguistic landscape. In a country now characterised by multilingualism, heteroglossia, polyphony and translanguaging, the author debates where the discourse practices of those born post-1994 may lead.
The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the main theories, concepts, contexts and applications of this rapidly developing field of study. Including 47 state-of-the art chapters from leading international scholars, the handbook covers key concepts, regional spread, linguistic features and communication processes, domains and functions, ELF in academia, ELF and pedagogy and future trends. This handbook is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of English as a lingua franca and world/global Englishes more broadly, within English language, applied linguistics, and education.
This edited book attempts to foreground how challenges and complexities between policy and practice intertwine in the teaching and learning of the STEM subjects in multilingual settings, and how they (policy and practice) impact on educational processes, developments and outcomes. The unique feature of this book, thus, lies in its combination of not just language issues in the teaching and learning of the STEM subjects, but also in how these issues relate to policy and practice in multilingual contexts and how STEM research and practice may inform and shape language policies and their implementation in multilingual contexts. This book is of interest to stakeholders involved in STEM education such as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, tertiary level teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers as well as other professionals with responsibilities in STEM education subjects. The book is written in a way that is accessible to a wide range of backgrounds, including those who are in language education.
