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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Research supports our findings: African students tend to associate English with education and consider their home languages as less importa because they are not
used for educational purposes.
Introduction
The call to decolonise South African universities has been the focus of academic and public attention for at least two decades now.1 Yet, if a visitor
who had last been in the country twenty years
ago were to walk around one of our institutions, she would be excused if she didn’t notice any fundamental changes in that direction. What she would be particularly puzzled by is why, despite the supposed urgency of calls for decolonisation and the predominantly African identity of our students, most instruction still happens in English – the second, third or sometimes even sixth language
for most students. The Philosophy Dictionary
for Africa is a project, funded by the University Research Committee (URC) at the University of Johannesburg, which lays the foundation for redressing this unjust state of affairs.
The project
The project was inspired by the experimental work one of
our team members did recently with multilingual tutors. Throughout 2018 and 2019, Prof. Hennie Lötter was delivering his Philosophy lectures in English, but asking students to engage in discussion in their mother tongue. A team of tutors – funded by the Faculty of Humanities – were appointed to interpret back into English for students who weren’t fluent in the language spoken at that point in the discussion. The same team offered students the opportunity to write tutorial exercises in their mother tongue. What struck us was that students consistently reported a discomfort about using their home language in the context of an academic discussion. As a reason, some gave their lack of familiarity with the more sophisticated terms in their home language. Others gave as a reason the (clearly colonial) perception of English as superior for the purposes of research and learning.
Research supports our findings: African students tend to associate English with education and consider their home languages as less important because they are not used for educational purposes.2
1 To give just a handful of examples, Etieyibo (2016), Lebakeng et al. (2006), Metz (2015), Tabensky & Matthews (2015) and Venter (1997).
2 This sentiment is shared by many South African parents (Phindane 2015). The parents in this study preferred that their children be taught in English because it has more social and economic benefits.