‘Ndifuna imeaning yakhe’: translingual morphology in English teaching in a South African township classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT A Grade 4 English language teacher in a township school in Cape Town, South Africa, in her quest to equip learners with new target language resources, is not held back by the perceived boundaries dividing named languages. Instead she employs language in creative and goal-directed ways that we believe have not received enough focused linguistic attention in scholarship. While recognising the importance of research into code-switching, code-mixing and lexical borrowing among South Africa s indigenous languages, we draw on the work of functional linguists with an emphasis on the communicative function of linguistic signals and a de-emphasis on labelling languages. Central to this paper is the inchoative concept of translanguaging that is gaining ground in socio- and applied linguistics and aims at describing fluidity rather than reproducing established notions of separate languages. In township environments access to high-currency language resources (standard English) is often said to be absent due to teachers’ lack of linguistic and pedagogic capacity and schools’ lack of resources. Our main aim here is to focus on the presence of powerful language resources, rather than their absence, in such a highly scrutinised, purportedly deficient educational setting.