This investigation analyses current issues in the language teaching situation at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW). It defines parameters with which language educators can make choices. Effective language teaching is perceived as essential in order to have competent language learners. Language teaching (be if first, second or a foreign language) usually encompasses a body of knowledge that is drawn from linguistic and language learning theories. A practical component is also included which is based on the choice of teaching methodology. Several historical factors also played a major role in determining the manner in which languages should be taught at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW). The aim of this study was to evaluate the teaching situation at UDW. The primary focus was to investigate whether educators were applying the principles of contemporary linguistics in the language teaching situation at UDW. It became apparent that not many educators were applying the specific aspects of contemporary linguistics in their teaching. This inquiry considered the role of contemporary linguistics in language teaching and concentrates on the relevance and importance of the various components of linguistics. The chapter on some of the aspects of language teaching, including teaching strategies presented a discussion of the instructional options available for the responsive language educator. Language planning and policy was considered as a potential area of specialization. Formal and informal seminars, and workshops promoting the importance of contemporary linguistics and a genuine recommendation for language educators to pay some attention to L2 learning research was re-emphasized. / Thesis (M.A)-University of Durban-Westville, 2000.

The provision of written lecturer feedback at the draft stage of a draft-response-redraft process is an extensively used tool in the process genre approach to teaching academic writing. It is also regarded as an important vehicle for mediating access to the academic discourse community for students. This study has as its foundation the view that knowledge and learning is socially constructed and therefore, it is believed that the process of learning academic writing is closely related to a process of acculturation into the world of academic discourse (Quinn, 2000). There is a need to be aware that while students need these skills to succeed in the academic context, we need to be critical of the process of apprenticeship that takes place. Research has shown that although the process genre approach is widely used, the effectiveness of the intervention and the precise impact of this on the students and their essay writing skills have yet to be fully explored. This study uses a case study methodology, including an analysis of usable feedback points (Hyland, 1998) to evaluate the effectiveness of the draft-response-redraft process in facilitating the acquisition of academic writing skills and mediating access to the academic discourse community. The effectiveness of written lecturer feedback on student essays at the draft stage for twelve students doing a first year level tertiary Media Course (with the teaching of academic writing skills as a stated outcome) is explored. A survey of the responses of ninety students doing the course and a focus group discussion with nine students provide a context for a more detailed case study of the essays and responses of twelve students. These students were selected in order to obtain a range of age, gender, mother tongue, schooling background and marking lecturer in the data. The findings show that written feedback is perceived by the students to be valuable and most feel positive about participating in a draft-feedback-response process. However, the relationship between feedback points and improvement is not clear. Individual student factors and the dynamic interaction that takes place make every case unique. The evidence in this study supports the theory that re-writing facilitates improvement (Fathman and Whalley, 1990; Polio et al 1998 and Robb et al 1998) and shows that even brief or sketchy feedback does stimulate revision and can result in writing improvement, although whether this process assists in the long-term development of academic writing skills is the subject for another study. This study supports research which indicates that the dynamic interaction between lecturer and student in the draft-response-redraft process can facilitate the acquisition of academic literacy and mediate access to the academic discourse community. The data did, however, highlight aspects of the process that need to be implemented in order for the positive potential of the learning experience to be fully realised. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

This thesis explores how language, identity and ethnicity are intertwined in the post-apartheid South African state by focusing on one particular language group, i.e. the isiZulu-speaking community of the Umlazi township. Drawing from general theoretical foundations in the field and sociohistorical considerations, the study explores empirically the significance and saliency of isiZulu in the life experience and identity negotiations of Umlazi residents. By juxtaposing the role and functions ofisiZulu with the economically hegemonic role of the English language, the social and cultural vitality of isiZulu is exposed. Using a triangulated approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative empirical methods, the study discusses subjective individual meanings and the involved emic categories, which guide the participants' understanding of who they are in relation to languages in the post-apartheid state. The study discusses how a sociolinguistic dichotomy between culturally and socially grounded identification processes and pragmatic and economically motivated ones manifests itself. The study reveals, inter alia, how language, i.e. isiZulu, is not only regarded as a cultural resource, but as a tool of identification that transcends the boundaries of race, class, religion and politics in a modern day township community. Furthermore, isiZuluspeakers' identities and ethnicities are first and foremost language-embedded, hence they are linguistically salient. It is argued that languages, i.e. isiZulu and English, are powerful devices that create boundaries, which consequently also divide the community. Finally, the researcher explores the implications of this study in the wider context of South Africa's sociolinguistic reality, and suggests that the promotion and development ofisiZulu is indeed a worthwhile undertaking in the democratic state. / Lolucwaningo olusekelwe ngezizathu ezitholakele ngendlela enzulu lubhekene nokuthola ukuthi ulwimu, ubunjalo bomuntu, kanye nobuzwe bakhe, kuvela kanjani njengengxenye yezinto eziwumphumela wobunjalo bezwe lase Mzansi Afrika emva kobandlululo. Lukwenza lokhu ngokuthi lugxile ohlobeni oluthile Iwabantu emphakathini okhuluma isiZulu wase Lokishini laseMlazi. Ngokucaphuna ezisekelweni zezinzululwazi ezithile emkhakheni wezifundo zocwaningo ngemphakathi nemilando yazo, lolucwaningo luhlola indlela oluballuleke ngayo ulwimi IwesiZulu ezimpilweni zabantu baseLokishini laseMlazi, nasezehlakalweni ezimpilweni zabo emizameni yokwakheka kobunjalo babo. Uma sibheka indawo nemisebenzi edlalwa ulimi IwesiZulu kolunye uhlangothi, kanye namandla olwimi IweSingisi kwezomnotho ngakolunye uhlangothi, kuyabonakala ukuthi amandla nokubaluleka kolwimi IwesiZulu emasikweni emiPhakathini alusebenzisayo kubekeka esimweni esingagwinyisi mathe impela. Ngokusebenzisa uhlobo locwaningo olubheka elukucwaningayo ngezingxenyeni ezintathu, bese luxuba nendlela yokucwaninga esebenzisa amanani abantu nezimpendulo eziphuma kubo qobo, lolucwaningo luhlaziya izindlela abantu abasebenzisa imibono yabo ekwakhekeni kobunjalo babo obuxubene nezinga lomnotho abakulo ngalesosikhathi, konke okugcina sekuholele abantu abayingxenye y a lolucwaningo bazibone ngendlela ethile engumphumela wokuthi baphuma ezweni ekade linobandluluo iminyaka eminingi. Lolucwaningo luhlola ukuthi ukungqubuzana phakathi kolwimi losiko olwakha ubunjalo babantu olukhulunywa emphakathi, kolunye uhlangothi, nezinto eziphathekayo ezihlangene nezomnotho, ngakolunye uhlangothi, kuziveza kanjani. Lolucwaningo luyaveza, phakathi kwezinye izinto, ukuthi ulwimi, lapha sikhuluma ngesiZulu, alubhekwa kuphela njengento esebenzela isiko, kodwa njengethuluzi elisebenza ekwakhekeni kobunjalo bomuntu okudlulela ngale kwemingcele yobuhlanga, yezinga lomnotho umuntu nomuntu akulo, inkolo umuntu akuyo, kanye nezepolitiki emphakathini wasemalokishini wanamuhla. Okudlulele, ubunjalo balabo abakhuluma ulwimi IwesiZulu nobuzwe babo ahlukene nakancane nolwimi Iwabo. Indlela ulwimi Iwabo olusebenza ngayo ichaza bona ukuthi bangobani. Lolucwaningo luthola nokuthi kukhona abagcizelelayo ukuthi izilimi isiZulu neSingisi ayizindlela ezinamandla ezakha imingcele egcina isihlukanise umphakathi waselokishini laseMlazi. Okokugcina, umcwaningi kulolucwaningo uhlola imiphumela yalokhu emiphakathini nasezilimini eniNingizimu Afrika iyonkana, bese ebeka imibono ethi ukuthuthukiswa nokuvuselelwa kolwimi IwesiZulu empeleni izinto ezidingekayo nezibalulekile ezweni lentando yeningi. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

It was as Head of Department of Languages in a rural high school in Southern KwaZulu-Natal, and as an L1 English educator in a primarily Zulu-speaking environment that I first realised the extent to which language is not neutral, and became curious about learners’ language choices in their community. My observation of rural parents sending learners to English multicultural schools made me similarly realise the extent to which language carries power. Language also carries ideologies and values, and can empower or disempower learners. At the same time, language is contextually and culturally embedded; and any attempt to explain language choice and language usage has to take a multiplicity of factors into account. This thesis addresses the topic of emerging bilingualism in three rural schools and school communities in Southern KwaZulu-Natal. In these primarily Zuluspeaking communities, an increasing dominance of English is resulting in bilingualism in what were formerly primarily monolingual communities. In particular it would appear that the bilingual education prescribed by education authorities is causally implicated in this emerging bilingualism. As a result, rural communities, like urban communities, are becoming melting pots where different languages, cultures and value systems are interwoven to satisfy economic, political, social and cultural needs. The South African Constitution speaks of multiculturalism and multilingualism as a defining characteristic of being South African. These principles are entrenched in broad national, provincial and local (school) educational policies. One such educational policy is the National Language in Education Policy (LIEP), which has considerable implications for schools in rural communities. While the LIEP postulates the eleven official languages as equal in bilingual education, in practice English is given an elevated position as the primary Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT). This paradox inherent in the iv LIEP appears to be having considerable impact on language usage and choices in both urban and rural communities. This investigation traces a group of rural communities which are currently experiencing a gradual transition from Zulu monolingualism towards increasing English and Zulu bilingualism. This study investigates this transition in the school and home context, as well as in its impact on the broader community. It considers whether additive or subtractive bilingualism may be emerging and the extent to which the educational policies of Outcomes-Based Education and LOLT may be causally implicated. The data collection methods employed include participant observation, questionnaires and interviews, which allow me to construct a detailed description of language usage, both in the school context, at home and in the community. In examining the patterns of the language choices of Grade 11 learners in the three selected high schools, I seek to allow the impact of the new educational policies on these learners and on their rural communities to become visible. I then consider a number of explanations for the types of bilingualism emerging in these three communities, in terms of varying contextual factors, the educational environment and the social and cultural identities favoured by speakers. / Theses (Ph.D.) - University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, 2010.

Universities in South Africa as yet do not provide multilingual education. For many students this means they have to use their second or additional language for the Discourse of the academic world. This dissertation investigates one Honours / Masters module offered by a lecturer in the theology department. It describes, in the form of a case study, how the lecturer uses the oracy skills (listening and speaking) to scaffold the students into the appropriate use of Academic Discourse. This lecturer uses the practicality of fieldwork, the intensity of emotional work and the flexibility of the spoken discourse to guide students into the reflexivity and criticality of the Academic Discourse. The data is discussed in terms of discourse analysis, genre theory and academic literacy, together with current understanding of feedback during process writing. My focus is on oral feedback. The results of this study indicate that the lecturer, and the students who took his module, felt satisfied that a greater depth of theological and linguistic criticality and reflexivity had been reached. The focus of this dissertation was on the students' uptake of the oral feedback given by the lecturer. It was the process that was explored rather than the final written product. Further research could investigate how much the students' writing improves as a result of intervention such as this. The lecturer's pedagogy maximised the language skills used in the Preacher (hortatory) Discourse that have something in common with the skills required in Academic (expository) Discourse. This dissertation concludes that these skills should be maintained while also developing the other skills required for Academic Discourse. These skills include the ability to be detached and uninvolved. However, if this detachment is to be achieved, the student needs first to be fully involved in the process so that transformation and appropriation can take place. This comes about through critical reflection - the hallmark of Academic Discourse. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The word pun is one of the figures of speech that people employ in everyday communication and especially in literary works in order to advance intricate aspects of meaning that may not be easy to express using 'plain' language. The word pun generally provides a speaker with an opportunity to mean more while saying less instead of saying more while meaning less. Considering the facts that people primarily communicate in order to exchange meaning, and that meaning can be very elusive and controversial, there are two questions about the use of the word pun. Can people understand the meaning in word puns? And, if they can, how do they do so? These questions are especially relevant in the case of literary works because the author is far removed from the audience. As such, there is no room for the negotiation of meaning. The current study probes these two questions by considering two types of word pun, Chiasmus and Metathesis, which are composed through the transposition of the morphological and or syntactic order of expressions. At a theoretical level, the study explores and explains the common underlying processes that guide the comprehension of the word puns. Further than that, it demonstrates through a case study that people are able to understand the word puns by using what the study proposes to be the reverse principle. Ultimately, the study illustrates how people derive meaning of utterances through interplay of the different subsystems of the language system. The word puns in this study present a good context in which to explore interfaces between semantics and other language fields by linking insights drawn from different fields of linguistic enquiry to the concept of meaning and demonstrating how aspects of all these come together in explaining the processing of word puns that involve morphological and syntactic transposition. Additionally, the study demonstrates that people understand the world by relating concepts to one another because of the underlying relationships existing between concepts and by virtue of the relationships that hold between and among words or word parts. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

In this study, I investigate the sociolinguistic factors that exert a subtractive influence on the Telugu language and Andhra culture. This study focuses on the sociolinguistic features of the Telugu Community and Telugu speaking Hindus in Natal. The majority of the Telugu speaking immigrants settled in the vicinity where they served during indentureship, for e.g. in Kearsney and Tongaat on the North Coast and, 1II0vo, Esperanza, Umzinto, Sezela and Port Shepstone on the South Coast. The contents of this study are largely based on the findings of the survey conducted among the Andhras living in Durban and surrounding areas. As a Telugu home language speaker and concomitantly, an Andhra, my concern about other Andhras moving away from our language and culture has stimulated me to investigate the factors exerting a subtractive influence on the Telugu language and Andhra Culture. My participation in the Andhra community has afforded me a unique opportunity to view the occurrences in the community. I have enjoyed vast experience as an executive member of the Andhra Maha Sabha of South Africa (hereafter AMSSA). The study aims to respond to the following key questions: • Why is there an erosion of the Telugu language and culture? • Is AMSSA fulfilling its aims and objectives in the nurturing of the Telugu language and Andhra culture in South Africa? • Does the Andhra Eisteddfod help in the maintenance of the Telugu language and Andhra culture in South Africa? • What is the community's attitude towards the Telugu language and Andhra culture? This study applies to the sociolinguistic phenomenon of language shift (L.S.) to determine the status of the TeLugu language. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2005.

The aim of this study is to investigate the politeness phenomena (particularly isiHlonipho) within the isiZulu speaking community in KwaZulu Natal. The study focuses on the understanding of isiHlonipho within the isiZulu speaking community and whether males and females from the urban and rural areas share a similar or different understanding of isiHlonipho. Furthermore the thesis investigates which of the existing Western/non-Western models of politeness are relevant for describing the politeness phenomena in the target community. In order to achieve triangulation, qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used. These comprised of interviews with cultural/religious leaders, discourse completion tasks, and interviews with males and females from urban and rural areas in Mdumezulu and Umlazi Township. My findings reveal that the understanding of politeness phenomena within the target community is more in keeping with that in other non-Western cultures than in Western cultures. Females from the rural area are found to utilize isiHlonipho more than those females from the urban area. On the basis of this limited sample, it is argued that females from the urban area may be beginning to reject traditional Zulu femininity in favour of more westernized identities. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

This thesis is based on the recorded speech and field notes of the author's three-year-old child who was acquiring three languages simultaneously (Chichewa, Chitumbuka and English). Chichewa is his mother's first language, Chitumbuka is his father's first language and English is both the language of the preschool that he was attending and the official language in Malawi. This study was unusual in that it involved African languages that are under-researched in the field of language acquisition and dealt with two cognate languages (Chichewa and Chitumbuka) and a non-cognate language, English. The fact that Chichewa and Chitumbuka strongly resemble each other may have made movement between the two easier for the child. The analysis of the child's recorded speech shows that he mixed more at the lexical level (64.2%) and less at the phonological level (6.3%). The findings demonstrate that what the child had learnt at school in English fulfilled a booster function when either Chichewa or Chitumbuka was used. The results also reveal that the child's language mixing was influenced by the topic of discussion, the context and the interlocutor's mixed input. The interlocutor's discourse strategies also had an impact on the child's use of mixing. The results therefore provide support for the bilingual bootstrapping hypothesis, the modeling hypothesis and the discourse hypothesis. The results also demonstrate that Chichewa was generally the matrix or host language when mixing occurred. At school, however, where only English was permitted, the question of a matrix language did not occur. Furthermore, the combination of lexical and grammatical morphemes demonstrates that Chichewa was dominant in the child's speech, in terms of the dominant-language hypothesis proposed by Petersen (1988). This study challenges the Free Morpheme Constraint and the Equivalence Constraint in that they do not appear to be universally applicable. Instead, the Matrix Language Frame Model is supported as it applies to code-mixing involving English and Bantu languages. This model was relevant, as the speech analyzed in this study involved code-mixing between English and the two Bantu languages, Chichewa and Chitumbuka. However, it was difficult to apply the Matrix Language Frame Model to some of the child's mixed utterances because the MLU was low. It is hoped therefore that researchers will create further models that will allow for an analysis of the mixed morphemes in single word utterances, especially for the Nguni African languages, which are agglutinative by nature. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

In this study, standard and non-standard isiZulu varieties are compared and contrasted. While standard isiZulu is proved to be treasured, it is not very well known or spoken among young urban and rural isiZulu speaking learners. The socio-historical development of isiZulu is examined in order to account for the dichotomy between ‘deep’ and ‘urban’ isiZulu. ‘IsiZulu esijulile’ [‘deep isiZulu’] and ‘isiZulu sasedolobheni’ [‘urban isiZulu’] are terms found useful to describe the differences. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the characteristics of standard and non-standard language in general and standard and non-standard isiZulu in particular are discussed. The empirical section of this thesis is based on a multi-method approach, that is, one hundred rural and urban learners are the participants of this study. This investigation suggests that the dichotomy between urban and rural varieties is not as stark as initially proposed (Mesthrie, 2002). / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.