{"title":"“Because guess what? I don’t even want to speak English”: English as an obstacle for the development of multilingualism at a South African institution","authors":"David Lasagabaster","doi":"10.1007/s10993-024-09707-5","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>South Africa immediately springs to mind as the epitome of multilingual language policies. In fact, its Constitution granted official status to 11 languages in 1996, and the Language Policy in Higher Education passed by the Ministry of Education in 2002 required universities to develop and use the indigenous official languages as academic languages, in addition to Afrikaans and English. With this multilingual milieu in mind, this study aimed at giving students voice in an attempt to unveil their language ideologies and attitudes by analysing their views on multilingualism and the use of English as main medium of instruction. Eleven focus groups with a total of 30 university students from different degrees at Stellenbosch University (SU) were organized to delve into four main issues: students’ perceptions on the university’s multilingual language policy; the actual use of the three official languages (Afrikaans, English and Xhosa) at SU; the impact of the use of English as the main medium of instruction; and the implementation of translanguaging practices. Despite the multilingual language policy of SU, our results reveal that there is a neatly established language hierarchy, where English reigns supreme at the top of the pyramid, followed by Afrikaans, while Xhosa remains at the base. Therefore, the preponderance of English as the language of academia only contributes to consolidating it as a strong identity factor in our interviewees’ multilingual identities, to the extent that Xhosa home language speakers disavow their own language in the academic domain.</p>","PeriodicalId":46781,"journal":{"name":"Language Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language Policy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-024-09707-5","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
South Africa immediately springs to mind as the epitome of multilingual language policies. In fact, its Constitution granted official status to 11 languages in 1996, and the Language Policy in Higher Education passed by the Ministry of Education in 2002 required universities to develop and use the indigenous official languages as academic languages, in addition to Afrikaans and English. With this multilingual milieu in mind, this study aimed at giving students voice in an attempt to unveil their language ideologies and attitudes by analysing their views on multilingualism and the use of English as main medium of instruction. Eleven focus groups with a total of 30 university students from different degrees at Stellenbosch University (SU) were organized to delve into four main issues: students’ perceptions on the university’s multilingual language policy; the actual use of the three official languages (Afrikaans, English and Xhosa) at SU; the impact of the use of English as the main medium of instruction; and the implementation of translanguaging practices. Despite the multilingual language policy of SU, our results reveal that there is a neatly established language hierarchy, where English reigns supreme at the top of the pyramid, followed by Afrikaans, while Xhosa remains at the base. Therefore, the preponderance of English as the language of academia only contributes to consolidating it as a strong identity factor in our interviewees’ multilingual identities, to the extent that Xhosa home language speakers disavow their own language in the academic domain.
期刊介绍：
Language Policy is highly relevant to scholars, students, specialists and policy-makers working in the fields of applied linguistics, language policy, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and learning. The journal aims to contribute to the field by publishing high-quality studies that build a sound theoretical understanding of the field of language policy and cover a range of cases, situations and regions worldwide.
A distinguishing feature of this journal is its focus on various dimensions of language educational policy. Language education policy includes decisions about which languages are to be used as a medium of instruction and/or taught in schools, as well as analysis of these policies within their social, ethnic, religious, political, cultural and economic contexts.
The journal aims to continue its tradition of bringing together solid scholarship on language policy and language education policy from around the world but also to expand its direction into new areas. The editors are very interested in papers that explore language policy not only at national levels but also at the institutional levels of schools, workplaces, families, health services, media and other entities. In particular, we welcome theoretical and empirical papers with sound qualitative or quantitative bases that critically explore how language policies are developed at local and regional levels, as well as on how they are enacted, contested and negotiated by the targets of that policy themselves. We seek papers on the above topics as they are researched and informed through interdisciplinary work within related fields such as education, anthropology, politics, linguistics, economics, law, history, ecology, and geography. We particularly are interested in papers from lesser-covered parts of the world of Africa and Asia.
Specifically we encourage papers in the following areas:
Detailed accounts of promoting and managing language (education) policy (who, what, why, and how) in local, institutional, national and global contexts.
Research papers on the development, implementation and effects of language policies, including implications for minority and majority languages, endangered languages, lingua francas and linguistic human rights;
Accounts of language policy development and implementation by governments and governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations and business enterprises, with a critical perspective (not only descriptive).
Accounts of attempts made by ethnic, religious and minority groups to establish, resist, or modify language policies (language policies ''from below'');
Theoretically and empirically informed papers addressing the enactment of language policy in public spaces, cyberspace and the broader language ecology (e.g., linguistic landscapes, sociocultural and ethnographic perspectives on language policy);
Review pieces of theory or research that contribute broadly to our understanding of language policy, including of how individual interests and practices interact with policy.
We also welcome proposals for special guest-edited thematic issues on any of the topics above, and short commentaries on topical issues in language policy or reactions to papers published in the journal.
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