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The language socialisation experiences of a grade r child in a black middle-class multilingual family
Get PDFSouth Africa (SA) is home to 11 official named languages; its Language in Education Policy (LIEP) identifies multilingualism as one of the defining characteristics of its citizenry (DOE, 1997). Moreover, English is the official Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) in most ex-Model C schools nationwide. It is the language that is reported to be valued by the middleclass, people who are known for placing a high premium on education (Soudien, 2004; Alexander, 2005). The aim of this ethnographic Language Socialisation study is to explore the language socialisation experiences of a Grade R child in a Black middle-class multilingual family residing in a Cape Town suburb. The study is framed by the question: What are the language socialisation experiences of a child from a Black middle-class multilingual family? It uses a socio-cultural approach, drawing from linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics to critically analyse the language ideologies, language practices and linguistic repertoires evident in both the home and school domains across which the young child traverses. Concepts such as multilingualism, Family Language Policy and ‘mother tongue’ identity are reviewed and used to gain insight into the lived language experiences of the Grade R child. The concepts of assimilation (Soudien, 2004) and anglonormativity (Christie & McKinney, 2017) are reflected on as markers of school language practices and ideologies. Findings reveal that the Grade R child is an emergent multilingual who participates meaningfully in multilingual conversations with her family but only produces English. Despite the evident heteroglossia (Bhaktin, 1991) of the family’s language practices through translanguaging (Garcia, 2009; Creese and Blackledge, 2010) and drawing from the range of resources in their linguistic repertoires (Busch, 2012), the parents continue to use their Tswana and Xhosa ethnicity as markers of their language identities. The parents want their children to speak their heritage languages for identity reasons. They also want them to speak English to ‘fit in’ with their peers and to access learning. They see the teaching of Tswana and Xhosa as their sole responsibility thereby absolving the school. Their view enables the schools’ status quo of anglonormativity to go unchallenged. The child, thus, experiences heritage languages as identity markers and languages reserved for home, and English as a valuable language resource that gives access to learning. The notion of a single language identity remains complex for a child who is expected to be multilingual at home but monolingual at school
Resisting dominant language and literacy ideologies through family multilingualism and the making of ikhaya
No full textMultilingualism is a social practice that humans have negotiated and managed uninhibited, long before the understanding of ‘language policy' as regulating mechanism with its oppressive monoglossic language ideologies (Romaine, 2001) came into being. As a consequence of occupation and division of African regions into colonies, monolingual ideologies that favoured European languages while marginalising African languages were passed along, thus denying the heteroglossic nature of African multilingualism (Makalela, 2018). Against the backdrop of this tension of interactions between monoglossia and heteroglossia, I examine family discourses in everyday language use of a South African family. In this family, processes of attribution of value to linguistic forms and practices are inscribed together with the construction of social difference and social inequality with which they are associated (Heller, 2007). Drawing on language socialisation (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and epistemologies of the south (Escobar, 2016) as theoretical frameworks, this study examines language and literacy practices and ideologies of an African-language(s) speaking family with a child who attends an historically white, English-medium school in South Africa. Using linguistic ethnography and digital ethnography, I constructed and analysed the case of an isiXhosa speaking mother-child duo as focal participants, who traverse between their township and rural homes, thus challenging Western notions of household arrangement and ‘nuclear/extended' family. Further, reflecting on the making of family and the variety of language registers and literacy practices observed offered insights into how the complex, fluid and dynamic structure of family mirrors the same complexity in heteroglossic language practices. With this insight, I introduce the term ikhaya, the isiXhosa word denoting both family and home, and expand on the definition of ‘family' in the African context. I argue that ikhaya captures the domain of home that is distributed across multiple physical homesteads and geographical spaces, as well as family, showing how language and home literacy practices in digital and physical spaces are pivotal in constructing family and resisting dominant language ideologies
Community literacy club and family language policymaking initiatives for biliteracy development
No full textBackground: Our article analyses two case studies that show an urban South African family and members of a community literacy club engaging in grassroots initiatives as family and community language policymakers and planners for bilingual and biliteracy development. Objectives: The main aim is to describe and analyse the initiatives taken by both community members of the literacy club and family members in challenging separate bilingualism, monoglossic, and anglonormative ideologies. Method: The researchers used linguistic ethnographic methods to collect data and primarily draw on image data, a written text at the literacy club, as well as transcribed data from observational data. Results: The research findings point to the critical role that communities and families play in developing and maintaining children’s home language, as well as desire and uses of more than one language to develop children’s biliteracy. Conclusion: We view children’s biliteracy development in the community and the family as rooted in the sociocultural through a process of drawing from a rich linguistic knowledge and vocabulary that is learned in context. Contribution: Our contribution to the field is in highlighting policymaking from below and how policymaking from above needs to meet language policymaking and planning from below. We also contribute to understandings of simultaneous biliteracy as opposed to separate and sequential biliteracy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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