Academic biliteracy in South African higher education: strategies and practices of successful students

Abstract

Academic support for higher education students in multilingual contexts often focuses on the development of separate language proficiencies, on the one hand, and on general study skills, on the other hand. In bi/multilingual education contexts where students are presented with lectures and study material in more than one language, successful students develop specific practices that allow them to exploit their bi/multilingual proficiency, that is, without focusing on one language only. This article reports on a qualitative study conducted with postgraduate students at Stellenbosch University. It probes the strategies and processes that successful bilingual students use when different languages are available to mediate cognitively challenging material. Bilingual strategies and practices that are employed emerged from a series of semi-structured interviews with postgraduate students, and are presented as an insight into bilingual learning.

Keywords:

• bilingual education
• bilingual learning
• biliteracy
• translanguaging

Notes

Multilingualism is understood as the use of more than one language, except when specific points need to be made about bilingualism and trilingualism.

‘HAUs’ is a term used to indicate those universities from the pre-1994 era, where Afrikaans was used exclusively as a language of learning and teaching.

The term ‘Coloured’ is a controversial ‘catch all’ category for people who did not fit into the Apartheid government's race-based categories. All the racial categories are still used today by government institutions to determine whether people in these groups are better represented in the traditionally white universities.

This situation is far from simple because of the dual-medium setup, which requires some ability to understand Afrikaans.

Not the student's real name.