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<h1 class="gmail-headline__title">Bureaucratic Rhetoric Won't Develop African Languages</h1>
<h2 class="gmail-headline__subtitle">Politicians have completely abdicated their duty, leaving it to academics to develop our languages.</h2> </div>
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<span class="gmail-timestamp__date--published">05/04/2017 03:56 SAST</span>
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<strong>Updated</strong>
12 hours ago
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Metji Makgoba
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Communications lecturer, media student
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Conrad Bornman / Gallo Images / Getty Images
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A resident from Heuningvlei during an People
attend a church service on September 17, 2014 in Clanwilliam.
Heuningvlei is a small village situated in the heart of the Cederberg
Mountains. It was started in 1825 when a Khoisan woman married a
Dutchman called Okhuis living in the area.
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<p>The discourse on the preservation of African
languages will continue to confuse young people until the government
advances a clear policy to promote indigenous languages in schools and
other social spheres.</p>
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<p>The
absence of a clear plan to support the development of local languages
has discursively conditioned many young people to develop a negative
attitude towards the English language, albeit, at their own risk.</p>
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<p>Contrary
to what other people want to have us believe, English remains an
important resource and social capital to achieve social mobility and to
access other material and discursive opportunities. This is partly
because of the uneven patterns and structures of our society and, in
particular, education and economic systems, which are centred around
Eurocentric models.</p>
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<blockquote><p>English
also occupies a dominant position in the distribution and relations of
power. It has been also used discursively to entrench and promote
inequality, especially among people who cannot speak and write it
properly.</p>
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</blockquote><p>This is a harsh reality that cannot be ignored.</p>
<p>Mastering
English positions one at the centre of economic opportunities. But
because the language has been associated with cultural imperialism and
colonialism, black people who speak 'better English' are considered
aliens in other sectors of society. As a leading Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o rightly notes, "In colonial conquest, language did to the mind
what the sword did to the bodies of the colonised." So, considering what
colonisers have done to destroy our society, this is not entirely
surprising.</p>
<p>But it is highly problematic in the absence of postcolonial African policy.</p>
<p>People,
especially political leaders who act as self-anointed prefects of our
time, usually vilify English and other foreign languages such as French
and German, to score political points.</p>
<p>They
speak passionately about the significance of indigenous languages on
public platforms, feigning concerns for their deterioration in the face
of English domination. But their aim is only to fool us with their
bureaucratic rhetoric under the pretext of caring about our cultural
values and traditions.</p>
<p>It
is not astonishing that organisations, such as the Pan South African
Language Board (PANSALB), whose mandate is to promote the development of
languages, including African languages, have remained mediocre without
even demonstrating a half-arsed attempt to drive an agenda on language
development.</p>
<p>They
have resigned their responsibility to academics, who also seem to
struggle in leading intellectual and public debates aimed at lobbying
the state to support calls for mother-tongue education and the promotion
of local languages.</p>
<p>Consequently,
this has created a vacuum in our public sphere that gives politicians
ammunition to criticise the English monopoly without offering concrete
plans to advance local languages.</p>
<blockquote><p>By
the way, often it is the same politicians who send their kids to
private schools to learn English as a first language, while poor kids
continue to learn English as a second language from teachers who have a
complicated relationship with grammar.</p>
</blockquote><p>This
leaves young people from less privileged backgrounds with confusion.
They are always reminded of the dangers of losing their cultural
identities through learning English without being provided with the
capacity to master their mother tongues.</p>
<p>To
make things worse, the importance of multilingualism or bilingualism,
which PANSALB claims to promote, remains absent from the national
discourse of language policy.</p>
<p>As a result
of this mess, black students and learners develop linguistic and
cognitive problems which negatively affect their learning. By the same
token, the majority of black kids can neither speak English nor their
mother tongues proficiently.</p>
<p>They
are trapped between the discourses that condemn English as an
imperialist language and those that superficially promote African
languages without providing resources to advance the cause.</p>
<p>These problems emerge in their development stages right until their postgraduate studies.</p>
<p>Academics
who have supervised both honours and masters students from most rural
schools will tell you that instead of focusing on research concepts and,
critically, engaging with academic and conceptual materials, they spend
a huge amount of time trying to teach their students basic things, such
as sentence construction.</p>
<p>This is frustrating for some lecturers who do not understand the cultural background of such students.</p>
<p>Sympathisers,
usually people who have managed to scrape through these structural
injustices, believe that the burden of dealing with the troubles of
learning a foreign language without appropriate professional guidance
has conditioned some students to lose confidence in their abilities.</p>
<p>It has also erected barriers that stop them from learning.</p>
<p>The rippling
effect of this is that some end up being accustomed to cutting corners
or simply cutting and pasting information from the internet to complete
their academic assignments because they are either not equipped to
engage with intellectual materials or are not taught to think critically
in independent ways.</p>
<blockquote><p>It
is no doubt that this perpetuates structural exclusion and violence -
determining who access employment opportunities – and continues to put
people learning English as a first language at an advantage.</p>
</blockquote><p>The
chances are, if you struggle to grasp the basic concepts of the medium
of instruction, like many kids from rural public schools, your chances
of completing a masters programme or an honours degree become limited,
let alone securing a job interview.</p>
<p>In his satirical piece, <em>Dear Jobless Graduate</em>,
Professor Jonathan Jansen, lamented poor language skills among
graduates and how this keeps them unemployed. 'To begin with, take a
close look at your curriculum vitae. You will notice spelling errors and
large gaps between words. You will see that your paragraphs are not
always aligned, and that your references at the end are missing
information,' he wrote.</p>
<p>'The way you used language was not upbeat, and you made several grammatical errors that the panel members noticed.'</p>
<p>This does not mean that many kids who are subjected to this problem are less intelligent.</p>
<p>But the learning environments set them up for failure.</p>
<p>In the
absence of a coherent ideological programme to develop their linguistic
skills, they end up speaking a mixture of two languages without
mastering either.</p>
<p>The
shortage of senior black academics in a country where blacks command a
majority can also be linked to this problem even though it may intersect
with other socio-economics problems.</p>
<p>If we do not
fix it, especially at basic education level, we should forget about
increasing the number of PhD researchers. In addition, the worst part is
the large number of students, which emerged as a direct result of the
massification of education. It has put strains on our decaying
infrastructure and compounded the problem of academic literacy in our
education system.</p>
<p>Some
students abandon their academic careers because they are continually or
repeatedly labelled weak by people who do not understand socio-economic
problems that shaped their learning experiences.</p>
<p>Other
students obtain lower grades in their research modules, mainly because
they struggle with handling the amount of writing required at such
levels or to keep up with the rigours of postgraduate education.</p>
<p>These grades simply put a stop to their academic progression, even though they do not holistically reflect their capabilities.</p>
<p>Since high
grades are associated with intelligence without questioning the
circumstances or conditions that created them, such students are
considered stupid and will live with that scar forever. At worst, other
assessors commit a costly mistake of using grammar to measure the
student's intellects without trying to understand the causes of their
lower levels of language proficiency.</p><p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/metji-makgoba/bureaucratic-rhetoric-wont-develop-african-languages_a_22017359/">http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/metji-makgoba/bureaucratic-rhetoric-wont-develop-african-languages_a_22017359/</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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