The Fated Knot: Class, Racialization, and Linguistic Inequality in South African Schools

• In Event: 31.090 - Productions of Time-Space in Literacy Studies: Scale, Movement, and Texts

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: Despite admirable efforts by many organizations and educators, there is strong evidence that the ‘legacies of Apartheid’ remain in place in South Africa’s education system, entangling economic inequality, racial categorization, and de facto language hierarchy (Spaull, 2013). This paper uses concepts of register and sociolinguistic scale to examine social and linguistic inequalities in contemporary South Africa, especially in educational settings. A primary objective is to enable a more nuanced understanding of reproductive and transformative processes in education by developing more spatially- and temporally-sensitive studies of the language resources that speakers actually employ, and how those resources are included or excluded in differently scaled communicative activities (Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck, 2005; Collins, 2011).

Theoretical framework: The paper draws on a literacy practices tradition, emphasizing the ideological framing of ‘text’ and ‘speaking’ (Baynham & Prinsloo, 2012), and research on sociolinguistic scale, alerting us to the social inequalities that pervade language use (Blommaert, 2007). It analyzes register processes (Agha, 2007) in the multilingual complexity of contemporary of South Africa. Synthesizing literature on class dynamics and racialization practices, I examine how school-centered register processes demarcate valued and devalued varieties of South Africa’s many official languages, tending towards familiar processes of educational exclusion and social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Author, 2009).

Methods/Data: The methods are ethnographic and discourse analytic and employ a range of semiotic concepts, such as index, ideology, and register (Silverstein, 2003). The data presented come from a study of language and education policy in contemporary South Africa. It examines national and provincial language policy documents and ethnographic data from a study of an English-medium primary school in Cape Town, focused on the experience of linguistically diverse students, the perspectives of school staff and the views of parents.

Findings: In the English-medium school studied, most students were poor and spoke first languages other than English. Teachers in the school carefully distinguished official times and places of ‘English Only’ versus the ‘multilingual life’ of students and wider community. This attested to a familiar institutional language hierarchy in South Africa (Prinsloo, 2011), though with unexpected contrasts indicative of class and race categories. Individual teachers expressed differing understandings of how language diversity might be accommodated, and some pointed to the importance of register differences within English and other languages spoken by the students. Contextualizing the case study in relation to South African research on language varieties, classroom dynamics, and social transformation (Kerfoot 2014; McKinney 2013), I develop an argument about register processes and schooling.

Significance: The persistence of Apartheid-era relationships between language, race, class and education pose formidable challenges for contemporary South African democracy (Bloch 2009). Drawing on the South African material, this paper investigates the entangling of social and linguistic prejudice by analyzing register process. There are implications for discourse studies, comparative education, and North America educational research and policy.

Author

• James P. Collins, University at Albany - SUNY