Negotiating meaning in multilingual group work: a case study of higher education in Rwanda

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how students handle the linguistic diversity they are exposed to during group-work sessions at a university in Rwanda. The data consist of five audio-recorded group-work sessions initiated by a lecturer in a management course. The data were analysed drawing on theories relating to code-switching and learning in multilingual settings. Our findings show that active use of multiple languages, although time consuming, has great potential to facilitate learning, thus emphasizing the complementarities rather than exclusion of languages used in Rwanda.

Keywords:

• higher education
• multilingual group work
• code-switching
• language complementarities
• translanguaging

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to a previous draft. We also want to thank participating students for their cooperation and SidaSarec, Sweden for generous funding.