The shift to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated online learning at home for South African (and other) students. Using a critical paradigm, qualitative approach and case study design, this study, underpinned by critical theory, used interviews, voice notes and text messages to generate data to explore how South African university students’ home contexts shape their experiences of ERTL. Using thematic analysis, the findings indicated that student learning at home was negatively impacted by poor internet connectivity, home responsibilities, cramped living conditions, lack of safety, and financial and psycho-social stresses. The findings exposed the lived realities of students’ home contexts, made more difficult through the pandemic. This study adds to the literature on student adaptation to learning in the pandemic within home contexts characterised by resource poverty and challenging psycho-social conditions.
Arguments for bottom-up approaches in language planning are currently in vogue. Rarely, however, are such arguments supported by evidence demonstrating how such bottom-up planning leading to successful implementation can be achieved. This article presents evidence based on archival documentation in the form of annual reports and manuscripts written by administrators that document how, through community empowerment, the Tonga, a minority (a term which the Tonga do not use) language group from Zimbabwe, successfully lobbied for the promotion and development of Tonga as the language of instruction in all Tonga-speaking areas. But the success of the promotion is constrained by the nature of the framework within which language, heritage and micro-nationalism form the basis of the promotion exercise.
This article describes grassroots forms of language activism undertaken by Zimbabwean minority language groups in order to develop and promote their languages for -gies employed by these marginalised language groups in order to attain ideological consensus as they pursued the struggle for their language rights. These initiatives are undertaken in a context in which the government's language-in-education policy overtly and covertly betrays assimilationist tendencies. This article draws on the case of initiatives by Zimbabwean minority language groups to challenge the linguistic status quo and demand their linguistic human rights, to argue that it is important to embark on those measures that ensure that speakers of the non-dominant languages assume a prominent role in such processes. The article concludes by suggesting a research agenda which places speakers of non-dominant, marginalised languages at the centre of language revitalisation initiatives.
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