Books and Book Chapters (Linguistics)
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Item 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’ responsesItem Foreword. In: BethAnne Paulsrud, Zhongfeng Tian, and Jeanette Toth (Eds.), At the crossroads of english-medium Instruction and translanguaging(Multilingual Matters, 2021) Antia, Bassey E.Exclusive English-medium instruction (EMI), especially one that also takes its norms for the ‘E’ exogenously, is an aberration in those countries that lie outside of the ‘inner circle’ of the UK, USA, Anglophone Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and parts of the Caribbean in Kachru’s (1992) World Englishes model. Aberration is also arguably apt as a description for the practice of EMI in certain communities in these inner circle countries. Exclusive EMI in ‘outer or expanding circle’ countries and communities is a cultural travesty, one that highlights the hegemonic slant and reach of either or both colonial cultural politics and contemporary political economy. On this view, then, EMI in content area pedagogy, even when it is initiated locally, is cut from the same ideological fabric of ‘linguistic imperialism’ as the ‘monolingual fallacy’ in the teaching of English in outer/ expanding circle environments which Phillipson (1992) criticises. In both content and English language pedagogy, EMI guarantees that the inner circle has a huge market for educational resources and services, as well as a cheap and readily usable workforce. Because language, as critical language awareness reminds us, is more than a means of communication, EMI in outer/expanding circle contexts is easily able to shape local aspirations and serve as a local system of social selection for a global marketplace that is tied to the apron strings of the inner circle. To take on the ‘E’ in EMI, as this collection does, is therefore much more than an exercise in documenting pedagogical practices.Item Language policy and terminology in South Africa(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015) Antia, Bassey E.This chapter describes the development of the language policy programme of post-apartheid South Africa. It highlights both the place of terminology in this policy programme and some of its achievements. As the fortunes of terminology are inevitably bound up with the fate of the policy on multilingualism, the chapter draws attention to difficulties that have arisen in the course of implementing the policy and suggests three sociolinguistic paradigms that offer explanatory frameworks for these challenges. It concludes by describing on-going terminology initiatives at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) that attempt to respond to some of the implications of the sociolinguistic paradigms.Item Text annotations: Examining evidence for a multisemiotic instinct and the intertextuality of the sign in a database of pristine self-directed communication(Taylor and Francis Inc., 2021) Antia, Bassey E.; Mafofo, LynnA Kuhnian paradigm shift in Applied/Sociolinguistics has ushered in a number of new lenses for rethinking the study of language and communication, but there has been rather limited synergy among the raft of new conceptualizations. As a consequence, the collective knowledge generated by, for instance, integrationism, multimodality and translingualism, has not been deployed to elucidate overarching questions that arguably unite them. This chapter funnels these three scholarly directions into a synergistic framework, multisemioticity, which is then applied to a relatively understudied database of first-order and receptive communication – text annotations. As jottings of the mind, annotations bear fewer imprints of normative consciousness and activity, and therefore are an interesting source for both investigating and enhancing the explanatory adequacy of theorization around language and communication. The analysis reveals an underlying multisemiotic instinct in annotation, which in turn suggests that reading in the southern context studied unfolds through a rich communicative repertoire in which languages, colors, graphology, images, intertextuality interact to create meaning.Item Space/place matters(CMDR 2017, 2017) Milani, Tommaso M.; Williams, Quentin; Stroud, ChristopherThis special issue of Multilingual Margins on the theme of �Space/ place matters� has its origin in a doctoral summer school organised in December 2016 by the Department of Linguistics and the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape as part of a collaboration with the University of Oslo and three other South African universities � Stellenbosch University, University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand � and financed by Research Council of Norway�s programme International Partnerships for Excellent Education, Research and Innovation (INTPART). Doctoral students based in Norway and South Africa attended the summer school, presented their research projects, and were encouraged to submit an article to Multilingual Margins. This was with a view to training budding scholars to deal with the peer-review process of academic publishing. This special issue is the material outcome of this process and includes three articles that have a common interest in unpicking the complex relationship between language and space/placeItem Semiotic signature of transformation in a diachronic corpus of a South African political party(Benjamins, 2019) Antia, Bassey E.; Hendricks, TamsynCorpus analysis has become established as an approach to the study of language description or for applied pursuits in language teaching, terminology, and so on. However, because of the social indexicalities of language use, corpora can also inform studies of social phenomena. This chapter draws on social semiotics to argue that, in the analysis of social phenomena, meanings that are socially significant can be read not only from what is said in corpora, but also from a range of other resources, such as names of persons and places as well as language choices made in texts. This chapter thus uses two heuristics, onomastics and discursive mono-/multilingualism, to query a diachronic corpus associated with a South African political party for evidence of whether or not the party has over time become more inclusive, contrary to its discursive positioning by a rival party as an untransformed organisation. The analysis shows evidence of the party opening up to diversity in terms of race, gender, geography, and language choice, but the finding raises the question of the relationship between semiotic evidence and reality.Item The idea was that those who were trained needed to teach others�: Critical reflections on the 2014 Zambian language of initial literacy policy change(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021) Banda, Felix; Mwanza, David SaniJust before the opening of the school calendar in January 2014, the Zambian government announced a change in language in education policy from English to using a designated official regional Zambian language as the medium of instruction from nursery school to grade 4. Taking this language in education policy change in Zambia as a point of departure, this chapter is a critical reflection on language policy pronouncements in Zambia and in Africa generally. We trace the history of contradictions and contestations surrounding language education policies in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) through missionaries, the British South Africa Company, the British Colonial Office and the emergent independent African government administrations. Thereafter, we use observation and interview data from teacher training college lecturers, primary and secondary school teachers of Zambian languages, and Zambian languages subject experts to evaluate the 2014 policy shift. The pedagogical implications of the language policy change are analysed considering language zoning, the monolingual/monoglot ideologies, teacher preparedness, material availability, and the apparent gap between the government-endorsed standard Zambian languages and varieties of the same language and the �unofficial� languages spoken by teachers and learners in multilingual practices. We conclude that, although well-intentioned, the new policy is unlikely to yield the required results of promoting early literacy because it has been implemented before teachers were trained, before material was put in place and it ignored the multilingual dispensations in place.