School language profiles: valorizing linguistic resources in heteroglossic situations in South Africa

Abstract

Although South Africa is committed to a policy of linguistic diversity, the language-in-education policy is still plagued by the racialization of language issues under apartheid and, more recently, by new challenges posed by internal African migration. Drawing on the experience of a school in the Western Cape Province, this paper explores the role of language profiles in a speaker-centered approach to school language policy. Attention is paid to the ways in which the attribution of learners to clear-cut linguistic categories – in this case English and Afrikaans – and their ‘monolingualization’ within the process of literacy learning are at odds with both their everyday experiences of language and their linguistic aspirations. Using biographic and topological multimodal approaches with 13- to 15-year-old students at the school, it makes a contribution to the growing corpus of research that foregrounds the learner perspective and emphasizes emotional dimensions of literacy and language learning.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• heteroglossia
• language policy
• language profiles

Notes

1. The multimodal biographic approach presented here is being further developed at the research group ‘Spracherleben’ at the University of Vienna. See www.cis.or.at.

2. This paper is based on data deriving from a study of bilingual education in South Africa, coordinated by PRAESA (University of Cape Town). I wish to thank the PRAESA staff – especially Daryl Braam, with whom I jointly gathered the data on which this paper is based. The names of the school and the learners have been changed.