UWC Scholar Publishing Support (University of the Western Cape)
Not a member yet
1520 research outputs found
Sort by
We look past that’: Linguistic repertoires and ideologies of Business Studies teachers at a South African High School
Get PDFThis paper reports on the linguistic repertoires and language ideologies of a small group of Business Studies teachers at a high school in Cape Town, South Africa. Using language portraits and focus group interviews to collect data, we found through a thematic analysis that teachers talked about their own repertoires as performative, playful, and innovative. By contrast, the repertoires of their students are not described in the same manner. Instead, the teachers either erase big parts of their students’ linguistic repertoires or see “accents” and African languages as deficient. African languages are seen as not suitable to use as a language of teaching and learning and is constructed as hampering rather than facilitating educational progress. We use the notion of chronotope to explain how the school as an institution shapes the different narratives evoked around repertoires. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findingsfor teacher pedagogy
Re-imagining the Writing Workshop: The Creation of Multilingual, Collaborative Poetry
Get PDFThe following contributions describe the process of the writing workshop and the concrete writing and editing of a jointly produced multilingual poem
Multilingualism as racialization
Get PDFSouth African today remains a nation torn by violence and racial inequity. One of major challenges for its people is to create new futures across historically constituted racial divides, by finding ways to engage with each other across difference. In this regard, multilingualism holds out the promise of offering a way of bridging difference and opening spaces for engagement and empathy with Others. Today contemporary constructs of multilingualism, both in policy and everyday practice, continue to reinforce racialized divisions inherited from historical uses of language as a tool of colonialism, and a mechanism of governmentality in apartheid, the system of exploitation and state sanctioned institutional racism. In this paper we seek to demonstrate how multilingualism has always been, and remains today, an ‘epistemic’ site for managing constructed racialized diversity. In order to do so we trace periods of South Africa’s history. By way of conclusion, we suggest that alternative linguistic orders require a decolonial rethinking of the role of language(s) in epistemic, social and political life
The ‘rural-urban’ mix in the use of prepositions and prepositional phrases by students of literature in Kenyan universities
Get PDFThe language of instruction at university level in the Kenyan education system is English, so all written work for assignments and examinations is generated in English. And yet, each student probably uses two or three languages in their everyday life in situations away from the classroom. Indeed, the language policy allows the use of mother tongue as language of instruction in Primary School classes One to Three. African languages are structured differently from the English language, particularly where prepositions are concerned. Furthermore, each language grows in a specific cultural context; and the range of vocabulary of the African languages in Kenya is different from that of English. This may present a challenge for university students using English as the language of instruction in understanding academic concepts for which there is no equivalent in their mother tongue. In some instances, only a single word is available in the first language, where several different English words are possible or even necessary for clarity depending on the context. This paper explores this cultural peculiarity of linguistic marginalisation, which is both lexical and syntactic, as manifest in the written research papers of university literature students who would otherwise work simultaneously in different languages
The Performative Grammars of Civic Action: Decolonizing Interstices of Language through Theatricalizing Sheng
Get PDFMartin Banham’s ‘Languages of African Theatre’ evaluates artists torn between creating in English and writing in vernaculars. He asks, how can artists ‘decolonize the spirit’ of performing in the settler’s language without limiting what they say and how they say it? Banham goes on to argue that performance with its hybrid and transcendent multiple tongues allows for rich territory in which to both decolonize a subjugated past while bringing cultures together more freely and equally.
With this article, I problematize Banham’s proposal by analyzing from multiple positionalities a performance about language devised by students while I was a visiting professor in Kenya. The project: explore how youth employ the African Urban Youth Language ‘Sheng’ to build identity and resist oppressive systems. This performance was steeped in irony as the common ground for the theatre project was English, the oppressive lexicon of the students’ colonized past yet my only fluent language. Thus, as Banham attests, the artists used tools of ‘grammar’ and ‘politics of performance’ they had at their disposal to negotiate the performance landscape. Through the lenses of Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, Janelle Reinelt’s artists as ‘citizens-in-the making,’ echoed by Banham’s belief in the potential for theatre to transcend rigid borders and systems of power, I analyze a performance that liberated language while simultaneously being bound by it
The Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Get PDFThere is an urgency in theorising how diversity is negotiated, communicated, and disputed as a matter of everyday ordinariness that is compounded by the clear linkages between diversity, transformation, voice, agency, poverty and health. The way in which difference is categorised, somatised and reconfigured in multiple languages across quotidian encounters and in public and media forums is a central dynamic in how poverty and disadvantage are distributed and reproducedacross social and racial categorisations. In the South African context, finding ways of productively harnessing diversity in the building of a better society must be a priority
The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and resistance in Khoi orature
Get PDFBushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popular studies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesser known Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despite commonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open to discursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily found in Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figure of the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historical realities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued that Khoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginative use of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral culture allowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much less pronounced in Bushman narration
The Language of Urban Development in Johannesburg\u27s Inner City
No full textThis article engages with the language used by urban developers when planning areas of a city and how it influences the way media and social actors come to represent place. Its theoretical approach proposes a language of urban development based on Markus and Cameron’s (2002) language of buildings concept, which looks at the discourse used by architects and promoters in the construction of buildings. An analysis of interviews with developers and social actors of the inner city of Johannesburg as well as media articles portraying the area shows a correlation between the discourse used by all three bodies in terms of both the Western aspiration of an urban development model and the importance of safety and cleanliness to signify accessibility of place in Johannesbur