[lg policy] South Africa: Learning English

Sat Nov 14 15:11:23 UTC 2009

Learning English
Friday November 13th 2009

A leading Afrikaner historian rails against a policy he says is
driving language out of South Africa's universities but supports say
is making higher education more accessible, reports David Beresford

An increasingly bitter debate is developing in South Africa over
language policy at the country’s universities – notably Stellenbosch,
the Alma mater of almost all cabinet ministers, prime ministers and
presidents during the apartheid era. The cudgels have now been taken
up on behalf of Afrikaans by one of the country’s best-known
historians, Professor Hermann Giliomee. He claims that a policy to
teach some courses in Afrikaans and English at Stellenbosch, backed by
a $3.7m teaching and language development programme, heralds the death
of Afrikaans and will undermine Stellenbosch’s status as a
“predominantly Afrikaans university”.

The South African constitution recognises 11 languages, including
English and Afrikaans. It has been estimated that 13.3% of the
population use Afrikaans as their “home” language and 8.2% English.
The two largest language groupings are Zulu and Xhosa, which are the
home languages of 23.8% and 17.6% of the population respectively.
Government business tends to be conducted in English. The country has
11 “traditional” universities, of which four are popularly thought of
as English, three as Afrikaans and four as “black” (including the
“coloured”, or mixed-race University of the Western Cape).

In a provocative article by Giliomee, published by the Mail & Guardian
newspaper last month, the professor said a “vital battle for the
future of Afrikaans as a university language” has been going on for
the last 10 years. He claims that a language policy adopted at the
university in 2001 singled out the teaching of classes in Afrikaans
as the “automatic” or “default” option. He said this policy allows
“the use of dual medium only in circumscribed cases. Nevertheless,
Afrikaans single-medium courses have plummeted to only 38% of
undergraduate offerings and dual medium has risen in the same time to
45%.”

He added: “To make matters worse at Stellenbosch, the institution does
not insist on proficiency in Afrikaans as a prerequisite for a degree.
Students are not compelled to pass a language proficiency test in
order to proceed at the end of the first year. Lecturers are not
required to be proficient in the language(s) they teach in. The
university is unable to state how many have not mastered Afrikaans. No
effective monitoring system exists. The university frowns on such
practices and brands itself taalvriendelik (language-friendly).”
Giliomee concluded: “It is a great cultural tragedy that is unfolding.
Not only the university but all of South Africa will be immeasurably
poorer if Afrikaans is fatally weakened at Stellenbosch.”

But Stellenbosch’s vice-chancellor, Professor Russel Botman, defended
the university’s dual-langauge policy, saying that it would help it to
compete on a “globalised playing field”.
Writing a week after Giliomee’s piece was published, Botman
acknowledged the level of concerns about the greater use of English
but said that the aim of the university was to promote Afrikaans as an
academic language in a “multilingual context”. “We want to make
Stellenbosch more accessible to undergraduate students who are not
first-language speakers,” he said, adding that the university had set
aside $3.7m to support language training for teachers and students.

“Our aim is that undergraduate students must be able to study in the
language of instruction of their choice (Afrikaans or English), with
exposure to the other language, as long as it does not lead to racial
segregation in the parallel medium classes. The funding will be used
to appoint extra staff, translate learning material, create new
facilities and support curriculum redesign,” Botman said. The racial
overtones of the debate at Stellenbosch have been compounded by its
coincidence with an incident at the predominantly Afrikaans University
of the Free State. Amid outrage the university’s new black rector,
Jonathan Jansen, marked his appointment by dropping charges against
four white students who had fed urine to five black members of staff
as an initiation stunt.

Describing his decision as a gesture of toenadering (reconciliation),
Jansen said the students, who had been suspended and charged, would
be invited back to complete their degrees. Almost overlooked in the
fuss was the detail that Jansen also announced the introduction of
compulsory courses in Sesotho for white students at the university –
Sesotho being the predominant indigenous language in the Free State –
as well as compulsory Afrikaans for blacks.

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=1344&catID=18
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