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…

Over the past decades, the language management discourse in South Africa has focused on the development and intellectualization of the functional status of indigenous African languages in high-status domains. African languages are marginalized despite the existence of various empowering and restorative legislative provisions and policies of the…

The discussion of African languages as languages of learning and teaching can be traced back to the 1980s. To date, this discussion still continues and efforts to intellectualise African languages have been lax. Here, we present practical South African examples of higher education achievements in African languages that demonstrate the challenges…

This article presents a systematic review of research on language and multilingualism in mathematics education published in the South African journal Pythagoras from 1994 to 2021. This time frame was chosen as the year 1994 marked the acknowledgement of 11 official languages in the new democratic South Africa (including 9 indigenous languages),…

This study aims to apply critical pedagogy and a participatory approach by including an excluded context, the South African culture, into the curriculum of foreign language classes (EFL) in Turkey because the South African context (SA) has been ignored and excluded from the curriculum of global textbooks and EFL in Turkey. This comparative…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…

Language policy and Linguistic Landscapes (LL) are a highly contested area in South Africa. Due to Apartheid, the education system constitutes the core of such contestation. In Post-Apartheid South Africa the new Constitution of 1996, the South African Schools Act (SASA) and recent political initiatives such as the Use of Official Languages Act of…

South Africa's history of segregation and the privileging of English and Afrikaans as the only languages of teaching and learning beyond primary schooling, make the post-apartheid period a complex one, especially in light of the Constitutional commitment to multilingualism in the 11 official languages. Research on literacy and language teaching…

This paper focuses on code-switching (CS) in postcolonial (P-C) classrooms (e.g. Africa, Asia and Asia-Pacific) where the use of English has increased not only as a subject matter, but also as the language of instruction across all subjects. CS, a common behaviour among bilinguals and polyglots, refers broadly to the alternation between two or…

At the emergence of democracy in South Africa the government corrected linguistic imbalances by officialising eleven languages. Prior to that only English and Afrikaans were the recognised official languages. The Black population had rejected the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. However, such rejection did not mean the…

This paper draws attention to the central concern of authors in this issue, which is to offer translanguaging and genre theory as two promising pedagogical responses to education systems characterised by linguistic as well as socio-economic diversity. It also draws attention to the agency of teachers in the processes of engaging with the…

In the post-apartheid era, South Africa has adopted a language policy that gives official status to 11 languages (English, Afrikaans, and nine Bantu languages). However, English has remained the dominant language of business, public office, and education, and some research suggests that English is increasingly being spoken in domestic settings.…

This paper seeks to address the ways in which ideology and literacy practices shape the responses of students to an ongoing initiative at the University of the Western Cape aimed at diversifying options for epistemological access, specifically the language varieties and the modes in which parts of the curriculum for a third year linguistics module…

Worldwide globalisation has led to the anglicisation of higher education. This is also the case in South Africa since the advent of a new dispensation. Whereas theorising and research on language issues in higher education focuses predominantly on instrumental functions of language, this study investigates the symbolic functions of language as an…

The academic and public debates about language maintenance and language shift in the post-1994 South Africa distract attention from the more productive and important endeavour of explaining the nature of the multilingualism observed among users of African languages in urban contexts. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered here, based on…