Issues of identity and African unity surrounding the introduction of an exogenous African language, Swahili, at tertiary level in South Africa

Wildsmith-Cromarty, Rosemary; Conduah, Aloysius N.

doi:10.1080/13670050.2014.953772

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Where African languages are viewed positively, this is primarily because of the integrative value associated with these languages as important markers of identity (Dyers and Abongdia 2014;Kamwangamalu and Tovares 2016;Noboda 2010). Research in South Africa has, however, found that there are positive attitudes towards the introduction of African languages in higher education and towards the use of a multilingual MOI (Aziakpono and Bekker 2010;Ditsele 2016;Lombard 2017;Nkosi 2014;Wildsmith-Cromarty and Conduah 2014).…”

Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudes towards English as a Medium of Instruction in Malawian Universities

Reilly

2019

English Academy Review

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Malawi's language-in-education policies have been through numerous changes since the colonial period. In 1996 a policy directive was announced which encouraged the use of the mother tongue in the early stages of education, before transitioning to English. However, this policy was never effectively implemented and, in 2014, an English-only policy was announced. This has resulted in renewed debate around which languages are suitable for use as mediums of instruction in the country. This article will discuss the Malawian language-in-education policy context, with a focus on university education and the prevailing attitudes which students and staff exhibit towards English. This will be done through an analysis of data collected through focus groups and interviews with students and staff in Malawian universities. The results show that, while English is viewed positively and as suitable for use within universities, it is not viewed uncritically and there are complex attitudes towards the language. English skills are viewed as a valuable resource; however, so too are multilingual language skills. Students and staff also display positive attitudes towards the use of a multilingual language policy in the university, suggesting that the recent policy changes in Malawi do not reflect stakeholder attitudes.

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Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudes towards English as a Medium of Instruction in Malawian Universities

Reilly

2019

English Academy Review

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“…A South Africa-based study highlights the crucial role of regional languages in education. Wildsmith-Cromarty & Conduah's (2014) research on the positive response to the introduction of Swahili, though it was not the dominant language of any of the students, as an optional language for the Bachelor of Arts degree at a university in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa illustrated, in part, the ways group identities intersected with understandings of language use. Immigrant students favored learning Swahili either as a language of inter cultural communication within South Africa or as a language of African uni fication.…”

Section: Sites Of Primary Concern: Institutions Of Higher Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic ecology and multilingual education

Brown¹

2022

EHA

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The fiftieth anniversary of Haugen’s pioneering publication on the ecology of language provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on some of the promising new trends within recent research on multilingual education that centers linguistic ecology. The research explored in this article takes up linguistic ecology as a primary lens to understand a range of linguistic phenomena, particularly in contexts of dynamic change within the focus community. This article highlights three developments within linguistic ecology research over the last fifteen years that reflect the continuing relevance and contributions of this framework for multilingual education: (1) the focus on higher education, (2) translanguaging, and (3) rights and sustainability. The first section provides an overview of the defining aspects of linguistic ecology – its holism and dynamism – as well as foundational aspects of the ecology of language research in education and concludes with prospects for future research.

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“…Furthermore, Swahili is a native language of 60 million Tanzanians, of whom 140 million speak it as a second language in East, Central, and Southern Africa, which serves as an inspiration for this study. In addition, countries such as South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana are considering its introduction into schools [26], [27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering SMS Spam in Swahili Text Using Deep Learning Approaches

Mambina,

Ndibwile,

Uwimpuhwe

et al. 2024

IEEE Access

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In today's communications, Short Message Service (SMS) and Internet protocol-based messaging systems are the most widely used channels. These services are currently the target of an unprecedented number of threats due to their rising appeal. Some spammers have more nefarious motives, even though most spam stems from businesses seeking to promote their products. In recent years, as new security threats such as Smishing have emerged, the amount of SMS spam has experienced substantial growth. The scientific community has paid less attention to SMS spam than email spam despite the fact that both are extensively utilized. SMS spam presents extra processing hurdles. These include the use of lexical variants, SMS-like contractions, or sophisticated obfuscations, which degrade the performance of conventional filtering solutions. In this study, we investigate the efficacy of deep-learning models for filtering Swahili SMS spam based on linguistics and behavioral patterns using a real-world dataset from telecommunications companies in Tanzania. To validate the effectiveness of our models we subjected them to the UCI dataset of spam messages written in English. The models were trained and tested with 10 k-fold cross validation. The experimental results show that CNN-LSTM-LSTM hybrid model attained the highest accuracy of 99.98 on Swahili dataset while CNN-BiLSTM performed better on UCI dataset with an accuracy of 98.38.

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Issues of identity and African unity surrounding the introduction of an exogenous African language, Swahili, at tertiary level in South Africa

Cited by 5 publications

References 12 publications

Attitudes towards English as a Medium of Instruction in Malawian Universities

Attitudes towards English as a Medium of Instruction in Malawian Universities

Linguistic ecology and multilingual education

Uncovering SMS Spam in Swahili Text Using Deep Learning Approaches

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