Divergences Between Educational Policy and Practice in Multilingual South Africa

• In Event: Collaborative Research on Multilingual Literacies in African Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The purpose is develop an account of why the stated intentions at a policy level to produce effective multilingual schooling in South African schooling give way to the dominance of English in schooling practices, and to examine what that means for schooling and social inequality in this context.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
The presentation draws on interactional socio-linguistic and ethnographic research (Makoni and Pennycook, 1997; Blommaert, 2005; 2010) that questions prevalent formulations of language as boundaried systems that correlate to identifiable groups of people. The contrasting perspective is that users draw on linguistic resources that are organised in ways that make sense under specific conditions (Heller, 2007). Language resources carry social value for reasons that are not simply to do with their functionality (Bourdieu, 1991; Norton, 2000).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Analysis of language policy statements in South Africa is carried out using the resources of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough and Wodak, 2010; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Gee, 1999; Blommaert, 2010; 2005). School-based ethnographic data is collected, drawing on the practices and resources of linguistic ethnography (Duranti, 2001) and the New Literacy Studies (Heath and Street, 2008; Purcell-Gates, 2007). Contrastive analysis is used to compare the policy statements and the data from schools.
Data sources, evidence, objects or materials
Government publications and policy documents; recorded and transcribed observational data on literacy and language teaching from classrooms at three schools in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/points of view
The strategy for equalizing the designated languages in official policy statements works on the assumption that language operates normally as a neutral social medium, and that directed social planning can ‘level the playing fields’, whereas this study supports research which shows language as operating as a non-neutral medium in stratified social contexts (Duranti, 2010, Bourdieu, 1991). The analysis brings into question the monodiscursive-monolingual norms implicit in prevalent concepts of bilingualism and shows their consequences in schooling practice, including a strong preference for the construction of parallel monolingual spaces for learning. The analysis of ethnographic data, on the other hand, finds that what counts as ‘a language’ is in fact both diverse and specific. The language and literacy practices of teachers and students in sub-elite contexts show a consistency in terms of the rules, norms and opportunities that are available, even though these do not match those from the dominant socio-political centre, and do not pass muster under standardised testing conditions that do not tolerate divergences.

Scientific of scholarly significance of the study or work
The analysis calls for alternatives at a policy level, such as revising conceptualisations about languages as boundaried systemic resources, a revised approach to linguistic varieties and their uses in classroom pedagogies, revisions of standardisation practices in relation to linguistic forms, and the fostering of linguistic and orthographic fluidity in the classroom, at the levels of talk and writing.

Author

• Mastin Prinsloo, University of Cape Town