Robert Balfour

University Language Policies, Internationalism, Multilingualism, and Language Development in South Africa and the UK.

This paper examines legislation concerning language policy and language choice in the UK and South Africa. In particular an account of the pressures and imperatives to which such policy development must respond is provided. The paper suggests that the comparison between South Africa and the UK is relevant and compelling, not least because both countries respond to an awareness of multilingualism and internationalism in both the schooling and higher education systems, though in different ways and with different effects. The paper explores the degree to which language policies may facilitate, but may also obstruct, language development and choice in HEIs in the UK and South Africa.

Progress and Challenges for Language Policy Implementation at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal approved its bilingual language policy in 2006 based on the framework of the National Language Policy for Higher Education of 2002. The guiding principles of this policy suggest that the university develops the use of isiZulu as a language of instruction and communication, in line with recommendations of the Ministerial Committee report, which investigated the development of indigenous African languages as media of instruction in higher education. The implementation of the bilingual policy began in 2008, under the responsibility of the universitys language board and faculties. Whilst debates on the policy itself are endless, there are foreseen challenges in its implementation. This is a case of ‘acquisition planning’ as in effect acquisition of isiZulu as a second language will be expected from all the university staff and students. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of these challenges and to identify steps towards language policy implementation.

Students’ access to digital literacy at a South African university: Privilege and marginalisation

Abstract Lifelong learning has become associated with participation in the digital age, affecting everything from access to information technology, to its use in teaching and learning. It is therefore inevitable that educationists turn to digital literacy practices to examine their contribution to, and influence on, learning. This article explores the digital literacy practices of a group of higher education students with minimal previous access to digital resources, as well as how they compensate for uneven access, with a view to examining what they perceive to be challenges and possibilities offered by technology. Thus the article highlights how they are ‘caught-between’ two worlds: the technologicised and non-technologicised. The work is framed by New Literacy Studies, which suggests that literacy is a contextualised practice positioned in relation to social institutions and the power relations that sustain them (Gee, 1996). Emerging themes indicate that students perceive digital practices to have symbolic value, and provide access to cultural capital.

Between the Lines: Gender in the reception of texts by schoolchildren in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa [1]

The article explores the interface between literature, gender, culture and language within an educational context. It examines the responses of Zulu boys and girls to the introduction of a new curriculum that integrated language and literary study in a rural school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Specifically, it shows how reading can lead to a more complex and critical notion of how gender portends differential access to power.

Mind the gaps: higher education language policies, the national curriculum and language research

What emerges repeatedly in research regarding language choice in South Africa is that people negotiate culture, face and identity through more than one language, and balance the need for modernity and the value of tradition, together with awareness that multiculturalism is normative in South Africa. South African scholarship focusing on bilingualism is also informed by the experiences of other countries in which multilingualism has become a feature of language planning. In South Africa, parents are not blind consumers of hegemonic languages, and learners are not insensitive to the dangers of language attrition or subtractive bilingualism. This paper argues, based on its focus on the gaps between policy intentions, research and practices, for closer collaboration between education sectors (the tertiary, and the primary and secondary) in South Africa to better support the development of multilingualism as envisaged by national and higher education language policy documentation.

Every voice counts: Towards a new agenda for schools in rural communities in the age of AIDS

This discussion piece focuses on possible strategies for taking action around some of the challenges teachers and schools in rural communities face in the context of larger systemic changes in southern Africa, and particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS. For this purpose we examine five key entry points, i.e. teachers’ lives, school leadership and management, the voices of young people, teachers working with communities, and partnerships and pedagogies for preparing new teachers. We propose visual participatory research as a possible strategy for providing a space for dialogue that could be unleashed from the narrow political and economical aims of education transformation in South Africa. In a context where rural communities and schools are often viewed and approached as deficient, we consider the importance of an asset-based approach, invoking specific types of communication as an alternative to a needs-based approach to community development.

The long walk

In November 2009, I guest-edited Part I of a special issue of The Language Learning Journal which examined language education and policy development in schools in South Africa in the period after apartheid. In that special issue, contributors focused particularly on the school sector which, in terms of constitutional provisions, was meant to become the educational arena in which mother tongue education became not only possible but also the lived experience of children and teachers in schools and communities where mother tongue education had been chosen. It was argued in the years after 1994 that state support and the development of indigenous languages and language teachers would make language choice viable, and that the production of teaching materials in indigenous languages, together with the development of academic discourse in indigenous languages at the higher education level, would provide the contextual-linguistic resources to enable language choice. In the years immediately after the policy changes in 1994, a great deal of confidence in the capacity of the State and its agencies was expressed. The tone was more cautious in two special issues of South African journals, Alternation (Addison 2002) and The English Academy Review (Klopper 2003), which articulated concerns about the development of English in relation to indigenous languages and literatures. The ideals of this first decade were the focus of a special issue of the Canadian journal, The English Quarterly (Balfour and Mitchell 2004), which reviewed developments in language education, research and policy in South Africa between 1994 and 2004. Even then, there was a notion that much could be accomplished quickly, provided the commitment and support existed. The reality has, of course, been rather different. In spite of the disappointment of commentators and scholars with the slow pace of change, who bemoaned the domination of English to the detriment of indigenous languages, communities themselves continue to choose, and indeed insist on, English-only education, even in areas where its actual provision has occurred simultaneously in the classroom with the local indigenous languages. Simply put, in the decade following the first democratic elections, resources were not placed at the disposal either of schools or universities to develop mother tongue instruction or to make indigenous languages the languages of learning in the higher education system. Now, midway into the second decade of democracy, an opportunity for a more sustained and considered evaluation of change is provided by this special issue of The Language Learning Journal, which has been divided into two parts. Part I (2009) explored language policy and practice in South African schools, while Part II (2010) is devoted to higher education. Language Learning Journal Vol. 38, No. 3, November 2010, 249–251

Policy and strategies for ESL pedagogy in multilingual classrooms: the Classroom Talk Programme

This paper explores the impact of a specially designed programme of communicative strategies on English second language (ESL) development in a scaffolded case study that set out to promote teacher-guided, constructive learner talk in the outcomes-based education arts and culture classroom. The programme was implemented in a multilingual secondary school in Durban, South Africa, and focused on four groups of Grade 8 (aged 12–13) learners in 2003 and the same four groups of learners in Grade 9 (aged 13–14) in 2004. The paper explores the design and implementation of this programme through a description of lesson strategies which were devised and implemented with the help of educators in the school. Also described in the article are the assessment strategies used to ascertain what learning and progress in learner talk was made over a two-year period. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from students and educators alike, the paper demonstrates that triangulation of the findings allows a richly textured narrative to emerge of learning and progress in an otherwise under-resourced and difficult setting.

The (In)Visible Gay in Academic Leadership

The South African Constitution (1996) recognises historical and structural inequalities pertaining to groups “based on perceived or ‘real’ differences” (de Vos, 2004, p. 185). Law thus has an important role to play “in reordering …power relations in ways which strive to ensure that all individuals are treated as if they have the same moral worth” (de Vos, 2004, p. 185). Rothmann (2014, p. 84) noted that “though decriminalisation [of homosexuality has occurred, this does not] …ensure an eradication of homophobia” through legal or constitutional provisions.

“Water, water everywhere….”: new perspectives towards theory development for rural education research in (South) Africa

The scarcity of rural education research in South Africa parallels the relative absence of theory development emerging from the developing world. Education research is influenced by the paradigms in which it is located and draws from established (and Western) theories of psycho-social, geo-spatial, economic, and political development (Moletsane 2012, 2). The questions posed by such theories (whether post-colonial, critical, gender or geo-spatial) require responses from developing societies measured mostly in contrast to ideals established or validated elsewhere. While Northern hemisphere theorists may be describing the implications (theoretical economic, education, or geographic) of globalisation, the agenda for the developing East, and especially Africa, is influenced by a geo-spatial context which remains rural. If the environment, as noted by Stromquist (2002, 158), remains a major concern globally, it is seldom acknowledged as a factor in higher education research with reference to a focus on education development in Africa. This article contends that suitable theory can be developed to pose questions concerning the efficacy of education in Africa concerning rurality and education research.