The Functional Distribution of Setswana and English in Botswana

Bagwasi, Mompoloki Mmangaka

doi:10.1080/07908310308666669

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Swahili is the second language that they chose; students in standard one had not mastered Swahili, students in standard three seemed to have mastered the language in some way, but the students in standard eight used Swahili freely. The way in which the students used the Nandi language especially indicates that language is not only a medium of communication but is also a medium by which the identity of the students is conveyed (Bagwasi, 2003).…”

Section: English and Swahili Are Better In Schoolmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I use my mother tongue at home and with friends – not in school!’ Multilingualism and identity in rural Kenya

Spernes

2012

Language, Culture and Curriculum

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The present paper investigates students' experiences of being multilingual. Qualitative data have been collected during observation, focus groups, interviews and text writing in a public primary school in rural Kenya. The informants are students in standards one, three and eight whose mother tongue is the indigenous language called Nandi, which all these students use at home and with friends. The school languages are Swahili and English, and the use of Nandi is forbidden in school except in mothertongue lessons in standards one to three. The aim of the study is to explore the students' experiences of being multilingual, and to analyse how the prohibition against the use of the mother tongue in school may influence their identity. The data are interpreted in the light of research and theory concerned with the influence of the colonisation of education in Africa and the effect of languages on identity. Results indicated that the students are proud of their vernacular language and culture, but also see the importance of being multilingual in a global world. The students agree with the prohibition against the use of their mother tongue in school, and understand that English and Swahili are important for education. The conclusion constitutes a critical contribution to add to earlier research about multilingualism and education in Africa.

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Section: English and Swahili Are Better In Schoolmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I use my mother tongue at home and with friends – not in school!’ Multilingualism and identity in rural Kenya

Spernes

2012

Language, Culture and Curriculum

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“…Setswana is additionally spoken in South-Africa (where it is one of the official languages), Zimbabwe, and Namibia. In Botswana, where the data for the current study were collected, speakers of Setswana vary between 70% and 90% of the population (Andersson & Janson, 1997;Bagwasi, 2003), most of whom speak it as their mother tongue. In Botswana, primary education is offered in Setswana only in the first grade, after which education takes place in English, except for Setswana language classes, which are compulsory until the last year of high school.…”

Section: Linguistic Background: Setswanamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite this limited use of Setswana in the education system, Setswana is the dominant language of Botswana in terms of day-to-day usage. Setswana is not only spoken at home, but is also used in spoken and written form in government offices, local businesses, traditional courts, and even for official deliberations, which are later translated into English (Bagwasi, 2003). Setswana is also widely used in the media, except for the printed media, which are overwhelmingly in English, with some newspapers containing daily inserts in Setswana (Kgolo, 2014).…”

Section: Linguistic Background: Setswanamentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological decomposition in Bantu: a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation

Ciaccio

Kgolo

Clahsen

2020

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents. ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…This group of 'English-dominant bilinguals' (Baldauf & Djite, 2003: 221), as one could call them, may encourage one to question the rigidity inherent in the concept of a domain-specific 'functional network' of LWC and local languages (Annamalai, 2000), which is widely argued in the literature (Bagwasi, 2003;Fishman, 1977;House, 2003). For instance, Fishman argues that,…”

Section: Critiquing the Functional Distribution Of Lwc And Local Langmentioning

confidence: 97%

English Teachers’ Choice of Language for Publication: Qualitative Insights from Bangladesh

Hamid

2006

Current Issues in Language Planning

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The aim of this small-scale research was to gain some understanding of Bangladeshi English language teachers' language preference for publication purposes and the extent of the use of Bangla (Bengali), the L1, in their professional practice. Qualitative data for the study were gathered by means of a self-produced questionnaire. Results show that about three-quarters of the teachers published or would publish entirely in English because they believed that it was, among other reasons, the usual professional practice. More importantly, a number of teachers stated that they felt more comfortable writing academic essays in English. Regarding the use of L1, all 37 respondents pointed out that they used it sparingly in the classroom, and only a small number considered it a barrier in learning English, the L2. While emphasising the study's limitations, the paper suggests that English teachers' lack of confidence in L1 academic writing may be seen as indicating the potential direction of a slowly emerging individual bilingualism among university teachers of English. However, the paper also argues that the emergence of this potential bilingualism can be seen only at the individual rather than societal level, and, within the academic context, only in the limited domain of academic writing.

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The Functional Distribution of Setswana and English in Botswana

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

‘I use my mother tongue at home and with friends – not in school!’ Multilingualism and identity in rural Kenya

‘I use my mother tongue at home and with friends – not in school!’ Multilingualism and identity in rural Kenya

Morphological decomposition in Bantu: a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation

English Teachers’ Choice of Language for Publication: Qualitative Insights from Bangladesh

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