Books and Book Chapters (Linguistics)

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Affirming the biliteracy of university students: Current research on the provision of multilingual lecture resources at the University of the Western Cape
(Multilingual Matters, 2017) Antia, Bassey E.
Background: With lecture halls in South Africa and elsewhere becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural, there is greater recognition of the challenges posed to teaching and learning by the linguistic diversity and literacy heterogeneity of students. Although the scholarship on reading and/or writing in multiple languages (severally referred to as biliteracy/biliteracies, multilingual literacies, pluriliteracies) has yielded useful insights, questions of strategy for responding to this challenge continue to exercise the minds of scholars. This chapter reports on an initiative at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, intended to affirm the academic biliteracy (i.e. multilingual literacies) of students. In the initiative, multilingual and multimodal learning resources were made available to students on an undergraduate course, and students’ reflections on the experience of using the resources were elicited. Hornberger’s continua of biliteracy model provided the design principles for the learning resources, and served as framework for discussing students’ responses