In this article we investigate the transparency of language in learning place value in either a Southern African indigenous language (isiXhosa, Setswana, Oshiwambo or Emakhuwa) or a European-based language (Afrikaans, English, German or Portuguese). Since language is a key mediator in developing place value understanding, it is important to…

Many African higher education entrants have an African language as a first language, whereas English and Afrikaans are default media of instruction in South African higher education institutions (HEIs). This precludes equivalent chances of academic success for students. Linguistic diversity in HEIs might also influence students' experiences in…

Background: Given the lack of research into English language instruction in multilingual contexts, this study explored the switch from mother tongue to English in a South African township school. Aim: This study aims to find out how teachers and parents view the implementation of English as a medium of instruction. Setting: The study was conducted…

A substantial body of research has examined the role of English in South Africans' linguistic repertoires. Many of these studies have investigated whether a language shift towards English might be underway among first-language (L1) speakers of the indigenous languages. At the same time, the role of English in the repertoires of L1 English speakers…

In May 2023, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. However, this declaration does not remove severe negative impacts COVID-19 had on the education sector. This paper sets an objective to determine the impact of COVID-19 and the responses thereto in school operations…

In the online processing of long-distance wh-dependencies, native speakers have been found to make use of intermediate syntactic gaps, which has the effect of facilitating dependency resolution. This strategy has also been observed in second language (L2) speakers living in an L2 immersion context, but not in classroom L2 learners. This research…

This paper is an extension of our 2021 research into pre-service teachers' linguistic autobiographies in a culturally diverse South African university. The paper, which is presented as conversations, examines what we learned about ourselves and our students through their reflective writing, our reflective writing, and our ensuing conversations.…

Language is an important element in the struggle for social change and decolonization within South African tertiary education. We explored the relationship between indigenous languages and cocurricular involvement to sense of belonging. Data were collected via a survey of 4210 students that included demographics, cocurricular involvement, and…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

The global spread and hegemony of English as a medium of teaching, learning and research has come to be closely associated with neoliberalisation of higher education in the universities across the world, and has negatively impacted on epistemic issues, especially in Global South universities. No permanent solution has been found on challenges of…

This article offers an account of the development of student leaders' agency within the institutional culture of their residences at Stellenbosch University (SU). Residences at formerly white universities such as SU are struggling to align their welcoming practices and cultures to the requirements for immersion of the diverse students who now live…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

A recently published interview-based test, known by its partly German acronym, MARKO-D SA, is introduced in this article by way of a narrative of its development through various cycles of research. The 48-item test, in 4 South African languages, captures number concept development of children in the 6 to 8-year age group. The authors present their…

As part of a broader student campaign for 'free decolonized education', protests over language policies at select South African universities between 2015 and 2016 belied widespread positive appraisals of these policies, and revealed what is possibly an internal contradiction of the campaign. The discourse prior to the protests (e.g.…

In this study, we revisit the status of English relative to the African languages in South Africa by analysing new national data on the main language spoken outside the home. These data, which derive from the General Household Surveys of 2017 and 2018, complement commonly collected data on the main language spoken within the home. Our analysis…