There’s a quiet language revolution going on in one of the country’s less-publicised universities that more illustrious tertiary institutions could learn from.
And, for some students at the University of Limpopo, their varsity studies are helping them overcome historical disadvantages that still afflict schools.
‘Apartheid is not over in South Africa,” says Finkie Molope, a recent graduate of Limpopo University’s BA in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies (BA CEMS). ‘We still have schools where English and Afrikaans are the only languages taught even though black students dominate.”
BA CEMS is South Africa’s first and only dual-medium degree in which an African language, Northern Sotho, is used as a medium of instruction and assessment with English.
‘Many pupils in high school can’t read or write their mother tongues, which results in a loss of identity,” Molope says. She chose the degree to preserve her language and ‘to prove that you can be just as competent learning in your mother tongue”.
The University of Limpopo’s school of languages and communication studies launched the degree seven years ago, offering half the subjects in the BA CEMS degree in Northern Sotho and the other half in English.
The three-year undergraduate degree consists of two majors (studied up to third-year level): Contemporary English Language Studies (CELS), which is taught and assessed in English, and Thuto ya bolemente (Multilingual Studies or MUST), taught and assessed in Northern Sotho.
The English component (CELS) includes modules such as English in society, critical language awareness, language and literacy learning in a multilingual context and language and cognition.
The Northern Sotho component (MUST) features modules such as an introduction to multilingualism, multilingual services in South Africa and researching multilingualism.
Professor Esther Ramani, coordinator of the programme, says: ‘The degree represents a model of additive bilingualism because it develops students’ competence in English while simultaneously developing their knowledge and use of their home language for higher-order cognitive work.”
BA CEMS lecturers know they need to offer excellent access to English, while transferring the best materials and practices to the teaching and learning of the Northern Sotho modules, Ramani says. She notes that there was much academic and curricular restructuring in 2001 at the then-University of the North, as there was at other universities across South Africa.
The ‘intellectual space provided by the transformational agenda of higher education” encouraged her and her colleague, Dr Michael Joseph, to propose this bilingual degree, which was approved by the Council on Higher Education in 2002.
In the same year, however, many African language staff members were retrenched — but a generous grant from the Ford Foundation made it possible to launch the degree in 2003.
The grant was used to employ and train young Northern Sotho-speaking staff to develop cognitively challenging materials in Northern Sotho.
Equally importantly, key scholarly articles were translated from English into Northern Sotho.
BA CEMS is the site of research projects, such as the South Africa Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development, through which two master’s and one doctoral student receive bursaries to complete their postgraduate degrees.
The doctoral student is Mamphago Modiba, who was also the first Northern Sotho lecturer to teach the MUST modules from 2003 to 2008 and is now a language researcher in Parliament. Lecturers have made several conference presentations locally and internationally and have published their work widely.
However, BA CEMS is also a site of contestation: some academics and students believe that African languages cannot be used to teach university-level content and so discourage new students from registering for this degree.
Indeed, the launching of the degree in 2003 was resisted at many levels and it was only through the decisive intervention of the thenexecutive dean of humanities, Professor JL Teffo, that the degree was introduced at all.
BA CEMS is still not as well known as more established degree programmes but its strongest advocates are its students, who play a critical role in the recruitment of new students every year.
Feedback from students is unfailingly buoyant, both about the content of the modules and the competence of the staff teaching them. The confidence they exhibit in using both their own language and English is evidence of skills and strategies transfer across the two languages, a view passionately held by bilingual scholars worldwide.
‘I am proud that our university is the only one in South Africa that is actually implementing the 2002 National Language Policy for Higher Education,” says vice-chancellor Professor Nehemiah Mokgalong. This language policy mandates the development of African languages as mediums of instruction in tertiary institutions.
Says Professor Richard Madadzhe, director of the school of languages and communication studies: ‘The BA CEMS degree is unique and its success is making us hope that we can offer it in the other major languages of the province, namely Tshivenda and Xitsonga.”
But lack of funding so far has stymied this logical extension of BA CEMS to the other prominent languages of Limpopo, Ramani says.
Graduation figures remain modest — 24 students have completed the degree so far — but enrolment figures for individual modules offered in the BA CEMS degree have increased from 38 in 2003 to 192 in 2010. Many students register for CELS and MUST modules as electives, while pursuing degrees in other major subjects.
More telling, says Ramani, is that the degree has a pass rate of 92%, one of the highest in the university, and the majority of the students have completed the degree in the stipulated three years.
A third of the graduates are pursuing postgraduate studies (including one at Wits) and will become part of the pool of bilingual specialists who will help to make mother-tongue-based bilingual education — the term coined by the University of Cape Town’s Neville Alexander, a strong advocate of the intellectualisation of African languages — a reality.
Ramani says graduates are employable in several areas. ‘They can become lexicographers, bilingual teachers, translators or interpreters, or — most importantly — bilingual academics in a university, who can research and promote multilingualism.”
For more information on this unique degree, contact Professor Esther Ramani on 015 268 2880 or email her at [email protected]
A quiet revolution
Mapelo Tlowane graduated in 2005 with a BA CEMS and now works at the university as a lecturer in multilingual studies. She teaches the MUST modules in Northern Sotho and says she is excited to be part of this quiet revolution. She can ‘relate my teaching to the students’ experiences”, she says.
Tlowane says lecturers translate material themselves, including scholarly articles, which takes a long time, but most of it has been done. But there have been some challenges: ‘The lack of terminology for technical terms has been difficult but the kind of communication we have with
students who are able to express themselves in languages they know best has been phenomenal,” she says.