English monolingualism gains the upper hand

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COMMENT: Languages are not simply abstractions; they live in the minds and mouths of their speakers, and when they are not used in higher education, their capacity to develop academic or industry-based complexity of vocabulary, is limited.

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Increasingly, statutory and professional bodies are approaching universities in relation to the languages of instruction used in classrooms. The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants and Engineering’s Ikhusasa Student Financial Aid Programme are bodies which have stipulated that English is required because either the assessments associated with the board are to be taken in English , or the bursaries allocated are dependent on English being the medium of instruction.

Occasionally, academic leaders will address the important links between access to higher education and success through language. It seems everyone knows that learning through a home language is highly correlated to academic success and with success in acquiring a second or third language. Yet, our commitment to push beyond the rhetoric, the good intentions and even beyond the educational evidence to make multilingualism a reality in teaching learning in schools, let alone universities, is weak.

Because of the unique constellation of long-lived histories and the rejection of racism, the recognition that key educational opportunities had become the perverse instrument of the state, remained a sore point after 1994. The December 2017 judgment of the Constitutional Court on the unviability of Afrikaans as a language of instruction at the University of the Free State , again for a mixture of ideological and access reasons, risks sealing the fate of all South African languages, other than English, to the status of perpetual minority, even if the languages of the communities surrounding our universities, are majority languages.

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