‘Smuggling the vernacular into the classroom’: conflicts and tensions in classroom codeswitching in township/rural schools in South Africa

Foundation Phase student teachers' views towards learning isiXhosa in the B Ed Teacher Education programme

“…On further inquisition, the participant hypothesised that since most teachers can't speak isiXhosa they have caged themselves to the norm and therefore are not prepared to shift from their comfort zone. This is understandable given the hegemony of English (Alexander, 2000) and the paucity of school language policies that do not just recognise the multilingual nature of their schools but translate this knowledge into the curriculum (Probyn, 2009). Multilingual awareness has been criticised by some scholars as it fails to disrupt the status quo of English as a dominant language in schools (Bourne, 2001;Garcia, 2009).…”

“…Although these views have merit in a context where teachers' linguistic repertoires have not been extended beyond their home languages, the reality of classrooms challenges how teachers are prepared to teach in diverse settings. In most cases, teachers find themselves 'in between' following the schools' language policies, which construct classrooms as monolingual, and meeting the multilingual practical demands of their classroom discourses (Bourne, 2001;Mitchell, 2012;Probyn, 2009). In the context of this paper, understanding student teachers' views and recognising them as contributing to knowledge on learning an indigenous language seemed to resonate with the demands of a multilingual classroom discourse.…”

Discourse-shifting practices of a teacher and learning facilitator in a bilingual mathematics classroom

“…The highstakes exit examination from high school is offered in only English and Afrikaans, and English is dominant in tertiary education and the job market. In addition, teachers are not well trained in multilingual education (Setati, Adler, Reed, & Bapoo, 2002) and the use of the learners' home language is often seen as a necessary evil (Probyn, 2009) with their goal being to use as little 'vernacular' as possible. Learners are challenged in learning through a foreign language by a low English language infrastructure (Setati et al, 2002) in their rural setting, which includes limited availability of television in English and some radio and print advertisements.…”

Medium of instruction policies in Ghanaian and Indian primary schools: an overview of key issues and recommendations

“…Davis et al (2013), for example, show how Ghanaian students prefer being taught mathematics through English, despite difficulties in speaking, reading and understanding the language because they feel that this will help them to succeed in the world (see also Edu-Buandoh and Otchere, 2012). There is also significant pressure from parents, who generally want their children to speak English, on the assumption that this will provide them with greater opportunities for the future (James and Woodhead, 2013 for India;Norton, 2012;Probyn, 2009;Tembe and Norton, 2011 for Africa).…”

“…These include concrete examples of classroom translanguaging practices such as the teacher focusing primarily on communication and not correcting non-standard student uses; drawing simultaneously on mother tongue and English media to communicate and contextualise the decontextualised curricular content that students are working with; or inviting and encouraging questions to stimulate an interactive dialogic classroom. Fonken (2008) suggests that students be given a chance to think academically in the mother tongue first before responding in English, while Probyn (2009) also points to the value of mother tongue use for exploratory talk and group work. Ramanathan (2003;, in turn, suggests that teachers use the mother tongue to awaken students' interest in stories before moving on to English or to connect Western literary themes to accessible vernacular ones (e.g.…”