Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 20
Language and Education:
A Limpopo Lens
NANCY H. HORNBERGER
Not long ago, I sat in class at the University of Limpopo with
Sepedi-speaking students enrolled in their fi nal year of a three-year undergraduate
bachelor of arts programme, taught through the medium of both
English and Sepedi (SeSotho sa Leboa), one of nine African languages offi -
cially recognized in South Africa’s Constitution of 1993. This innovative
program in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies (CEMS) was
founded in 2003 by Professors Esther Ramani and Michael Joseph in direct
and creative response to the openings afforded by South Africa’s multilingual
language policy (Granville et al., 1998; Joseph & Ramani, 2004, 2006;
Ramani et al., 2007). CEMS is to date South Africa’s only bilingual
university-level program in English and an African language. My fi eldnote
from that day reads:
Toward the end of today’s Contemporary English Language Studies
(CELS) 302 Language and Thought class, professor Michael and I
step outside to warm ourselves in the sun while the three students
present (Delinah, Elizabeth, Sibongile) confer among themselves,
freely codeswitching in Sepedi and English, as to which of six child
language development paradigms introduced in class last week best
corresponds to a short text excerpt by K.C. Fuson 1979 describing a
caretaker’s interaction with a child. Earlier in today’s class we
engaged intensively in activities designed by Michael to deepen our
understanding of Vygotskyan private speech and prepare the students
to engage in their third-year research project exploring Sepedispeaking
children’s private speech: today’s activities included writing
silently and then discussing our own uses of private speech, gauging
various data sources such as diaries, interviews, and questionnaires
along a likert scale of soft to hard data, and now consideration of this
case in terms of Vygotskyan, Piagetian, Hallidayan, Behaviorist, and
Chomskyan paradigms, among others. For their research project,
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