Lost in the debate

From the fourth year of schooling, the majority of South African schools teach all subjects in English only. The devastating learning consequences of this for children who speak African languages at home have been compellingly captured in the documentary film Sink or Swim. These consequences include lack of conceptual understanding and little identification with the content.

In South Africa there are 12 official languages, including South African sign language. The Constitution allows any of these languages to be used as a medium of instruction in schools. But only English, and in a minority of schools Afrikaans, is used and resourced beyond Grade 3.

Only 9% of the population speaks English as a home language and the majority of these speakers are white. This means the schoolchildren who were advantaged during apartheid are still advantaged today. Therefore, the bua-lit language and literacy collective, of which we are members, has described the language policy in action in South African schools as racist.

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s announcement in Parliament on 9 March 2022 that indigenous African languages will be used as languages of instruction beyond Grade 3 is therefore very heartening. No implementation details have been given yet.

The Department of Basic Education’s decision is based on a pilot project in the Eastern Cape, using mother tongue-based bilingual education as a model. The pilot initiated the use of Sesotho and isiXhosa as languages of instruction in Grade 4 in 2012 and in 2020 the maths, physical science and history exam papers were available in Sesotho and isiXhosa as well as English.

In 2019, Grade 6 learners involved in the bilingual pilot scored on average 28 percentage points higher in natural science and technology than their English-only counterparts.

The Department of Basic Education’s announcement has had a mixed reception, with commentators debating whether African language medium of instruction can work.

But the bilingual aspect of the department’s project is getting lost in the debate. And the fact that the majority of South African teachers already teach bilingually is unacknowledged. They do so illicitly, in the form of oral “code-switching” between the African language(s) used by the children and English as the official language of learning and teaching. Decades-long research into code-switching has shown it can be effective in South African classrooms.

But code-switching is not supported by bilingual materials or assessments and is often frowned upon by department officials. This is because of fears that English will be compromised, as well as colonial ideas about African languages being irrelevant for use in education.

The new move by the Department of Basic Education is an opportunity to acknowledge, strengthen and, importantly, resource these bilingual practices.

In South Africa, bilingual education is associated historically with the education of white children. During apartheid, Afrikaans and English were the two official languages, with the goal that all white South Africans would become bilingual in these languages.

Bilingual education was implemented in different ways. It was common to use one language as the medium of instruction and teach the second as a subject.

There were also schools that used both Afrikaans and English as languages of instruction for different classes in the same grade. In “dual medium” schools the teacher used both English and Afrikaans to teach, and learners could choose the language of assessment.

Dual medium bilingual schools continue to be highly successful in producing bilingual speakers of English and Afrikaans.

Until now, bilingual education at scale using any of the nine official African languages and English as dual languages of instruction has not been available for children.

Schools need assistance to develop language policies that support bilingual or multilingual education. One size will most definitely not fit all schools in a richly multilingual and diverse society.

For example, in many schools in the rural Eastern Cape, where isiXhosa is dominant, it is feasible to implement a bilingual model using isiXhosa and English.

Bilingual teachers can teach using both languages – as they currently do unofficially – and use textbooks written in both.

A school with learners from multiple language backgrounds in a more diverse urban setting like Soweto will need a different approach, making use of “translanguaging”.

Translanguaging involves the fluid use of