Facilitating departures from monolingual discourses

Mwaniki M., van Reenen D., Makalela L.

Smith A., Smith B.

Heugh K.

This article offers a historiographic analysis of twentieth century debates amongst agents with linguistic, missionary and ideological interest in the standardisation or harmonisation of two widely used clusters of languages in South Africa, Nguni and Sotho. The discussion illustrates how faith-based and political ideologies interact with and bring influence to bear on the interpretation of linguistic endeavour. It also explores how theoretical considerations of linguistic diversity become entangled with political interest in the process of (re)articulating language policy. Whereas several authors (e.g. Harries in Afr Aff 87(346):25–52, 1988; Errington in Annu Rev Anthropol 30:19–39, 2001) have discussed nineteenth century missionary and linguistic endeavour or offered ideologically conceived proposals for the harmonisation of Nguni and Sotho languages (Nhlapo in Bantu Babel: will the Bantu languages live? The sixpenny library, vol 4. The African Bookman, Cape Town, 1944, in Nguni and Sotho, The African Bookman, Cape Town, 1945; Alexander in Language policy and national unity in South Africa/Azania, Buchu Books, Cape Town, 1989, in Democratically speaking. International perspectives on language planning, National Language Project, Cape Town, pp 56–68, 1992), the focus here is to demonstrate both continuity and disjuncture of debates amongst agents with different interests during the last century.

Eckert P.

The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This article sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that (a) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, potentially expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; (b) the meanings of variables are underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles, and (c) variation does not simply reflect, but also constructs, social meaning and hence is a force in social change.

CANAGARAJAH S.

Studies on translanguaging of multilingual students have turned their attention to teachable strategies in classrooms. This study is based on the assumption that it is possible to learn from students' translanguaging strategies while developing their proficiency through a dialogical pedagogy. Based on a classroom ethnography, this article describes the translanguaging strategies of a Saudi Arabian undergraduate student in her essay writing. Her strategies are classified through thematic coding of multiple forms of data: drafts of essay, journals, classroom assignments, peer review, stimulated recall, and member check. The strategies are of 4 types: recontextualization strategies, voice strategies, interactional strategies, and textualization strategies. The study describes how the feedback of the instructor and peers can help students question their choices, think critically about diverse options, assess the effectiveness of their choices, and develop metacognitive awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thibault P.J.

This article articulates some aspects of an emerging perspective shift on language: the distributed view. According to this view, languaging behavior and its organization is irreducible to the formal abstracta that have characterized the focus on a de Saussure-type system of formal regularities in mainstream linguistics over the past century. Language, in the distributed view, is a radically heterogeneous phenomenon that is spread across diverse spatiotemporal scales ranging from the neural to the cultural. It is not localizable on any one of them, but it involves complex interactions between phenomena on many different scales. A crucial distinction is thus presented and explained, viz. first-order languaging and second-order language. The former is grounded in the intrinsic expressivity and interactivity of human bodies-in-interaction. Second-order patterns emanate from the cultural dynamics of an entire population of interacting agents on longer, slower cultural-historical time-scales. The article also ...

Piazzoli E.

Balfour M.

The paper provides a review of some of the terminologies and definitions of applied theatre, critiques the ‘transformative principle’ argued for by some applied researchers, and extends this to a discussion on the complex relationship between donor agendas and the politics of intention that contribute to the shaping of applied discourse (Taylor 2003, 1). The paper goes on to propose a theatre of ‘little changes’ which eschews big claims of social efficacy, and suggests the need for a discourse which can better articulate an interdependence between the aesthetic imperatives and the possibilities of social engagement.

Wodak R.

Stinson M., Freebody K.

This paper reports on the Drama and Oral Language (DOL) research project, Singapore, 2004, which investigated the impact of process drama on the oral communication results of Normal Technical students in four schools.

Makalela L.

:  This paper re-examines the debate over the emergence of Black South African English (BSAE) as a variety of English that is institutionalized with distinct properties. It focuses on the tense logic in Bantu languages and discourse markers that chiefly account for uniquely BSAE features. Through an in-depth analysis of these linguistic properties, the paper presents fresh angles of reconceptualizing the status of BSAE, which might move the debate to a level that makes sense to the policy-makers and language planners. In the end, I argue for English harmonization in South Africa as a necessary path to empowering the local masses that are otherwise excluded through the orthodox tradition of upholding British Standard English in African classrooms.

Neelands J.

This paper seeks out the gaps between localised accounts of drama's efficacy in terms of producing transformations in students’ behaviours and sense of identities and the theoretical accounts of such transformations offered in the textual discourses of the field of Drama in Education. Drawing on a range of post-colonial and emancipatory discourses the paper tentatively suggests certain pre-conditions in the pedagogic and artistic intentions of drama practitioners that might indicate that personal and social transformations in drama could be the rule rather than exceptional ‘miracles’. These pre-conditions include a rejection of ‘domesticated’ and intra-aesthetic pedagogies of drama in favour of a socially committed pedagogy that regards students and the realities in which they dwell as ‘unfinished’ and ‘waiting to be created’.

Agha A.

In this article I discuss processes through which the values of cultural forms are formulated, maintained and communicated across social populations. My empirical focus is the emergence and spread of a prestige register of spoken British English, nowadays called ‘Received Pronunciation’. I discuss a number of characterological discourses of speech and accent that articulate the values of the register and bring them into circulation before particular audiences. I argue that the historical spread of the register was linked to the circulation of such discourses during the 18th and 19th centuries. I propose specific models for understanding the circulation of discourse across social populations and the means by which these values are recognized, maintained and transformed.

Errington J.

▪ Abstract  Academic knowledge of human linguistic diversity owes much to descriptions written, over four centuries ago, under the aegis of European colonial regimes around the world. This comparative review considers a small part of that body of linguistic descriptive work relative to its conditions of production: authorial interests that animated such writings, ideological and institutional milieux that enabled and shaped them, and the authoritative character they took on as natural symbols of colonial difference. European technologies of literacy enabled missionary and nonmissionary linguistic work that resulted in representations of languages as powerful icons of spiritual, territorial, and historical hierarchies that emerged in colonial societies. As descriptions of languages traveled from exotic colonial peripheries to European metropoles, they came under the purview of comparative philology. This disciplinary precursor to modern linguistics helped to legitimize colonial linguistic projects and legislate colonial difference on a global scale.

IRVINE J.T.

Although the classic Saussurean conception of language segregates the linguistic sign from the material world, this paper shows linguistic phenomena playing many roles in political economy. Linguistic signs may refer to aspects of an exchange system; differentiated ways of speaking may index social groups in a social division of labor; and linguistic “goods” may enter the marketplace as objects of exchange. These aspects of language are not mutually exclusive, but (instead) may coincide in the same stretch of discourse. Illustrations are drawn primarily from a rural Wolof community in Senegal. It is argued that linguistic signs are part of a political economy, not just vehicles for thinking about it. Only a conception of language as multifunctional can give an adequate view of the relations between language and the material world, and evade a false dichotomy between “idealists” and “materialists.”[language, political economy, sociolinguistics, semiotic theory, Senegal]

French C.

French C., Mkhize S.

This chapter is drawn from the first stage of performance training in French’s postdoctoral practice-as-research project Decolonising language ideologies in the body that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Given both the persistent issues with the rolling loss of electricity and bandwidth for video calls in South Africa, this project selected voice messages to navigate technological inequalities. The digital reading exchange between authors saw voice messages become meditative, reflective embodied and decolonising pedagogies. This chapter proposes the following factors as key contributors to this decolonisation: the mobilisation and transfer of embodiment within voice messages; the reciprocal and horizontal decisions made in the construction of this new ecology; the emphasis on orality and its relationship to key participants’ learning strengths; and corporeal displacement. Finally, the discussion puts forward processes of belief-building as core to the complex layering and unveiling of embodiment and knowledge within decolonising performance training and a South African higher educational context.

Heinrichs D.H., Hager G., McCormack B.A., Lazaroo N.

French C.