Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of Afrikaans
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The pedagogical soundness of the use of mother tongue/home language as language of instruction is beyond question. The superior educational results that this ensures have been recorded time and again. Moreover, in a situation where schooling is near universal, the use of local languages in the school system is crucial for the maintenance of linguistic diversity and promoting linguistic rights. The South African education system is characterised by a complex history that has made the issue of the medium of instruction/language of learning and teaching (LoLT) a burning one for learners who are not native speakers of English – particularly black learners who speak a southern African Bantu language. According to the regulations in place since 1997, any of the country’s 11 official languages may be used as a LoLT up to Grade 12/National Senior Certificate, but the use of African languages as LoLTs is in practice only supported for the first three school grades. In recent years, many schools in townships and rural areas have either drastically limited the use of African languages as LoLTs or have opted for a policy of using English as LoLT. This has contributed to questionable results in terms of literacy acquisition in both the mother tongue and in English, and has possibly also led to a loss of learning ability. Furthermore, this situation may also be threatening the transmission of languages to succeeding generations as many African families seem to be making English their home languages in a bid to improve their children’s chances in school and – they believe – their professional future. In reaction to this state of affairs, the Department of Education has established programmes, such as the Foundation for Learning Campaign, which seek to promote early mother tongue literacy through the provision of readers in all official languages. It is planning an extension of the use of African languages as LoLTs up to Grade 6 in pilot schools across the country. Teacher training in the use African languages as LoLTs and teaching them as subjects of study is being revamped. The research team studied two main issues: the requirements for the successful implementation of a mother tongue policy in education, and the teaching of African languages as subjects for native speakers. In contrast to provinces such as the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, urban Gauteng is exceptionally complex from a political point of view, and implementing a language-in-education model such as mother tongue-based bilingual education, accepted as the desirable approach in multilingual regions, may not be readily possible in the Gauteng education system. It is therefore necessary to collect sociolinguistic information about (urban) Gauteng schools in order to propose a language-in-education approach that will support learners’ educational development. Attention will also be given to issues such as the training of teachers to teach content subjects in African languages. The second part of the project is the training of African language teachers and the appropriateness of linguistic behaviour in urban school classrooms
Contact person: Prof VN Webb.
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