Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis traces the trajectories of a group of young Cameroonian learners as they engage in new social and educational spaces in two South African primary schools. Designed as a Linguistic Ethnography and using data from observations, interviews and more than 50 hours of recorded interaction, it illustrates the ways in which these learners position themselves and are differentially positioned within evolving discourses of inclusion and exclusion. As a current study in a multilingual African context, it joins a growing body of literature in Europe which points to the ways in which young people’s language choices and practices are socially and politically embedded in their histories of migration and implicated in relations of power, social difference and social inequality. The study is a Linguistic Ethnography of young school learners’ language experience, which falls outside the scope of much mainstream research. It is one of very few studies to focus on migrant children in contexts of the South where multilingualism is the reality yet where language-in-education policies tend to follow monoglossic norms. The focus is on how a group of 10-16 year old Cameroonian children use their multilingual repertoires to construct and negotiate identities both inside and outside the classroom. It also investigates in more detail the acts of identity of two individuals entering the same school with different linguistic profiles, who are positioned in differentiated ways in relation to transnational and local flows and interconnections. The context is a low socio-economic suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, where Cameroonian practices of language, class, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The study also contributes to an emerging body of qualitative research that seeks to develop greater understanding of the relationships between language learners, their socio-cultural worlds and processes of identity construction (Cummins, 1996; Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). ; Rampton, 1995, 2006). Recent international and South African studies tend to focus on secondary school learners, showing how they are struggling to negotiate the currents of a complex society (Adebanji, 2010; Sayed, 2002; Sookrajh, Gopal & Maharaj, 2005), although there is a recent and rapidly growing body of Scandinavian research on primary school children (for example, Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Madsen, 2008; Møller, 2009; Møller, Holmen & Jørgensen, 2012). In contrast, the children in this study are negotiating the transition between childhood and adolescence, faced with issues of race, linguistic competence and discrimination at a time when moving from one age group to the next should have been relatively unproblematic. They are thus entangled in different levels of transition: emotional, physical and spatial. These issues of transition and negotiation will be highlighted through the lens of positioning. The concepts of ‘position’ and ‘positioning’ (Davis & Harré, 1990) appear to have origins in marketing, where position refers to the communication strategies that allow certain products to be placed in a market among their competitors (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007, p. 20). Holloway (1984) first used the concept of positioning in the social sciences to analyse the construction of subjectivity in the area of heterosexual relationships (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007). Positioning here was explained as relational processes that constitute interaction with other individuals. The present study focuses on how ‘interactants’ position themselves vis-à-vis their words and texts, their audiences and the contexts they both "respond to and construct linguistically" (Jaffe, 2009, p.3). As they make use of lexical and grammatical tools available to them in interaction, it becomes apparent that the process of identity construction through positioning does not "reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, […] power and disempowerment" (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 607). Thus to interpret multilingual children’s positioning requires a recursive process, using a double perspective: it means looking at the day-to-day moments of interactional and other practices, and also the wider political discourses in which these practices may be embedded and historically rooted (Maguire, 2005) and which they index in different ways. These day-to-day moments of practice thus involve different “acts of identity” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) which can also be described as acts of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009). A stance may index multiple selves and social identities. However, not all stances are open to everyone: those whose who have their social, cultural or linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997) recognized in a particular space will be able to position themselves more strongly there than those who do not. Moreover, stances are not successful unless 'taken up' by interactants (Jaffe, 2009): this uptake may take the form of interlocutors’ stances of alignment, realignment, or misalignment (C. Goodwin, 2007; Matoesian, 2005). Uptake in multilingual contexts is influenced by the prevailing "linguistic market" (Bourdieu, 1991, pp.55-67): day to-day acts of positioning take place in inequitable markets. These ‘markets’ are fertile grounds for social stratification where speech acts and the languages in which they are realized are assigned different symbolic values (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997). Mastery of the 'legitimate' language or languages is then often a pre-condition for claiming symbolic and material resources. New institutional spaces in South Africa become interesting here, because they are characterized by new formations of class, changes in gender roles and relations and other instances of macro-structural shifts. In such spaces, linguistic hierarchies and patterns of distribution of linguistic resources are rapidly changing (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele, 2014). The school as a key institution in the distribution of social, cultural and linguistic capital is thus an important site for exploring the role of language and multilingualism in social and educational change. This thesis sets out to answer the following research questions: a) How do immigrant learners use their linguistic repertoires to construct, negotiate or contest identities in new school spaces? b) How do different spaces enable or constrain the new identities negotiated? c) What are the implications for language learning policy and practice? Data collection took place over two years between February 2010 and June 2013, and followed participants from grades 5 to 7 in the English medium and Afrikaans language classrooms. Participants were 10-16 year old Cameroonian children in two Cape Town schools, ten in each. The study contains nine chapters, with chapter 1 providing an overview of the background, rationale, and conceptual and methodological framework. Chapter 2 traces the shift towards the social in language studies, considering frameworks for understanding the differential values placed on linguistic resources as actors move across social spaces, both local and transnational. Here interaction is viewed as a crucial site for identity construction, generating a social stage through which reality is constructed, shared, and made meaningful. Chapter 3 reviews studies of interactional positioning amongst multilingual learners in social and educational contexts in South Africa and more globally. Chapter 4 focuses on the methodology used in the study, discussing the research design based on Linguistic Ethnography, a qualitative approach which is based on the two broad planks of ethnography and Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) and which enables an analytical framework combining Conversation Analysis (CA), Discourse Analysis (DA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together, these analytical tools enable a multifaceted illumination of the construction of identity in discourse. The various tools used in data collection are discussed in depth followed by comment on reflexivity, challenges in the field and limitations of the study. Chapter 5 delineates the researcher’s trajectory in the field. This comprises profiles of the study schools (including the schools’ socio-economic, ethnic and linguistic make-up in relation to teachers and learners), perspectives on why the schools were chosen, the differing receptions to a research presence there, and some reflections on the researcher’s identity construction. The chapter further explores different techniques of data collection within this context: field notes and thick description, interviews, and audio recordings of interactions in and out of schools. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present and analyse findings from classroom observation and interview data, together with audio-recordings of a group of Cameroonian learners interacting with each other and with children of other nationalities in classrooms, community and home spaces. These chapters aim to illustrate how these learners used linguistic resources to position themselves and others, to build, maintain and negotiate identities, and to assert or negate identifications. Chapters 7 and 8 build on the analysis presented in chapter 6 by focusing respectively on two key emergent themes: owning participatory spaces and defying positioning in multilingual spaces. Chapter 7 centres on the interactional and other means by which a 12 year old Anglophone learner, James, navigated his way increasingly successfully through new social and educational spaces, expanding his linguistic repertoire. Chapter 8 focuses on a 12 year old Francophone learner, Aline, and the ways in which she tried to convert her linguistic capital on new linguistic markets. Her efforts were more often than not met with negative evaluation, leading to a loss of both social and academic identities. The analysis of data thus serves as a rich point of entry for understanding the connections between linguistic repertoires, relations between ethnic groups, youth culture, and the experience of social change. Through their discursive production of selves, these adolescent learners supposed to be negotiating only the normal transition from one age group to the next) are here negotiating the currents of a complex society and dealing with issues of race, language and segregation. Findings suggest that participants had multiple identity options that were negotiated through different practices, from food choices to language and interactional norms. These different identity options were however constrained by existing norms and linguistic hierarchies in each space, allowing some to accommodate new linguistic practices and ways of doing things, while others experienced more ambivalent and contradictory processes of adaptation. In informal settings there was evidence of a third space characterized by a mélange of languages in which both formal and informal versions of English and French, along with Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE) and other Cameroonian languages, were used. However, even in these settings there was a gradual shift to English, indicating the penetration of macrosocial and institutional discourses into private spaces. The thesis concludes with a set of recommendations for caregivers, teachers and policymakers seeking to create schools more welcoming of diversity. It is hoped, then, that this study will help families and schools to realize the variety of ways in which linguistic repertoires influence school success, both social and educational, and to find ways of using these repertoires for development and learning. In this way, they might contribute to immigrant youngsters’ ability to construct strong identities as learners and valued social beings.

Magister Educationis - MEd / In South Africa, there has been little research into the language practices of multilingual students in tertiary institutions or into how such students negotiate identities in these globalising contexts where the dominance of English remains an important factor. This research was aimed at exploring the appropriateness of 1997 Language-In-Education policy for schools and the national Language Policy for Higher Education (2002) for equipping students for tertiary teaching and learning. It therefore investigated the relationship between the language practices and construction of identities of a group of multilingual first year students in the Education Faculty at a Western Cape university. In this integrated institution, in spite of the current political and socio-economic transformation that has been at the centre of new policies, the medium of instruction is still predominantly monolingual. The premise of the research was that in a multilingual country such as South Africa with 11 official languages, tertiary institutions ought to more vigorously engage with their current language policies in order to value and extend the language practices of multilingual students for academic learning. Here multilingual repertoires are understood as resources rather than problems. The research draws extensively on Bourdieu's notion of 'linguistic capital' quantifying language itself as a form of capital with a market value. Through thematic analysis of themes drawn from questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation in both tutorials and lectures, the investigation concluded that a monolingual medium of instruction to non-native speakers should be practised alongside other languages as means to support in their academic attainment. Finally the research emphasised the importance of code switching as a strategy that facilitates learning and promotes understanding of the role language resources play in social and academic interaction.

The presence of Allophone students in French-language secondary schools in Ottawa is gradually increasing. While the politique d’aménagement linguistique (PAL) insists on the use of French within the school, one may begin to wonder which language Allophone students are speaking. French? English? Their native language(s)? This qualitative case study of four multilingual Allophone students explores their language repertoire use in relation to their desired linguistic representation, their linguistic proficiency in French, English, and their native language(s), and their perceptions of language prestige. The results indicate that students spoke a significant amount of English, some French (particularly with their teacher or Francophone classmates), and minimal amounts of their native language. Recommendations are suggested to increase the effectiveness of PAL within a Francophone minority context and to ensure that the policy’s objects are attained.

Using transcribed data from six Spanish-English bilingual children (1;8 to 3;3) from the Perez corpus in the CHILDES database, this thesis examines Parental Discourse Strategies (PDS) used to influence child language use in a minority language context (Spanish in the United States). PDS (Lanza, 1992; 1997) are situated within a language socialization framework (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011) and can be viewed as part of the emerging field of family language policy (King & Fogle, 2013; Schwartz, 2010). This study looked at the overall language use, including the frequency and complexity, of English, Spanish, and mixed utterances by each parent and child in the corpus. The presence and rate of use of the PDS was calculated, as well as their successfulness in encouraging the children to use the minority language, as measured by the language of response to each PDS found. These strategies have been placed on a monolingual to bilingual continuum (Lanza, 1992) based on their expected success in influencing a child to use the language preferred by their parent. Results from a descriptive quantitative analysis of the data at the group and individual levels generally support the Parental Discourse Hypothesis, that is, the claim that certain strategies are more effective than others. Interestingly, it was found that the more successful strategies were used less frequently by the parents, while the less successful ones were more common. This apparent contradiction can be explained by conflicting pressure on parents to promote minority language use while also keeping fluid communication and preserving family harmony. This is discussed and further supported by some qualitative observations of child responses within discourse samples, highlighting children’s role as agents capable of negotiating their own linguistic socialization.

The fall of the Eastern Block, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the subsequent enlargement of the European Union to include former socialist countries contributed to an increase in the movement of people from Eastern to Western Europe which began about a decade earlier. Among them, the Roma are probably the most clearly recognizable group and surely the ones that received, and keep receiving, more media attention. While their presence in the media as subjects of discussion is a topic worth analyzing, the present work is about their presence in a particular medium, the Internet, as actors and producers of content. As a population of Indian origin spread across Europe over the past five centuries, Roma have often been regarded as a diaspora. Ethnographic studies about diasporas and their usage of the Internet have often described diasporic websites as discoursive spaces in which new, hydrid identities are negotiated and stereotyping and marginalizing discourses about diasporic subjects are challenged. The role of languages in these websites, however, has often been neglected. On the other hand, sociolinguistic studies have highlighted how the Internet provides a space for vernacular language usage in which the relaxation of language norms and users’ creativity play a crucial role in overcoming the limitations in text transmission imposed by the medium. A partial bridge between these two trends of studies has been provided by the analysis of code-switching in diasporic websites, which has shown how meaningful language alternation is used to flag users’ hybrid identities. The study of the relationship between diasporic languages and identities on the Internet clearly appears to be in its infancy and only few case studies have looked at the interactions between each diaspora’s specific cultural and sociolinguistic settings and the usage of the Internet. Furthermore, many diasporas, including the Roma, speak unwritten languages which have not been or are just starting to be standardized. Processes of language standardization have always involved both identity and language policies and have often been pivotal in struggles for nationhood or minority rights recognition. While so far such processes tended to be mostly centralized and top-down, the Internet is offering a space for the spontaneous transition from orality to literacy. Thus, analyzing the interaction between diasporic, non-standardized languages and the identities of their speakers as manifested on the Internet can provide new insights into the relations between diasporic languages and identities and into language standardization processes. The present work investigates these issues by analyzing the on-line usage of Romani, the Indic language spoken by many Roma. The study draws on data collected through an online ethnography from Radio Romani Mahala, a website created and used by the recently dispersed community of the Mitrovica Roma. The data are analyzed both qualitatively, using discourse analytic methods, and quantitatively, using traditional sociolinguistic approaches. Combining such approaches allows drawing a nuanced picture of the phenomena under observation accounting both for micro level, individual patterns of usage and macro level trends shared by all users involved. Particular attention is also paid to the emerging Romani spelling and the role played by individual users in the establishment of shared writing norms. The interdisciplinarity of this approach will show how the interplay between diasporic identities and attitudes, non-standard language ideologies and the possibilities offered by the Internet is leading to effective language codification without the intervention of a central authority and outside the frame of any nation-state policy. Such findings call for a re-thinking of current notions on linguistic human rights. Based on the viability of the Romani model, I thus propose a theory of linguistic pluralism in trans-national contexts centred around the notion of cosmopolitan sociabilities, non-utilitarian, everyday interactions creating open and inclusive relations across and even despite perceived cultural divides.

Thesis (M. A. (Translation Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2016 / This study is an evaluation of language management by the University of Limpopo. It is divided into six chapters which are arranged as follows: Chapter one serves to introduce the study by first giving background to the study and the research problems. The researcher’s aims and objectives as well as the research design, method used to collect and analyse data were discussed. Chapter two deals with literature review that covers the scope of Language Management Theory; the language policy in higher education; the intellectualisation of African languages; the advantages of using African languages in education; the non-implementation of language policies; and the attitudes towards the use of African languages. Chapter three discusses the methodology used in the research. The methodology used in this research is qualitative and the method used to collect data was questionnaires and interviews. Ten students and ten lecturers answered the research questionnaires and furthermore five language practitioners were also consulted for this study. Chapter four of this research compiled a sociolinguistic profile of the University of Limpopo. SWOT analysis of languages was also done to determine the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the official indigenous languages of the University of Limpopo. Chapter five presents the interpretation of results. The data from students, lecturers, and language practitioners were examined separately. SPSS version 23 was used to analyse the data collected through questionnaires and the graphs are shown in chapter four. Content analysis was used as well to analyse the data collected through interviews. And lastly, the summary of the results was presented. Chapter six presents the summary of all the chapters included in this research. It also provides the recommendations of the study.

In 2019, Statistics Canada reported that the death by suicide rate among Inuit in Canada was approximately nine times higher than that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. This alarming statistic reflects the ongoing impact of colonial legacy on Inuit society, which has been characterized as cultural genocide and linguicide (TRC, 2015). In the last two decades, various organizations have taken up efforts to help heal communities, however there is little research examining what makes those efforts effective, and virtually none that has addressed the place of language within mental health programming. Yet, language is a pillar of Inuit health and wellness (ITK, 2016). This thesis explores institutional language policies pertaining to the provision of mental health services to Inuit in Nunavut from a decolonial perspective. I conduct a document review and six semi-structured interviews to examine which government-funded mental health programs provide services in the Inuit Language, the challenges they face in doing so, and solutions that they may envision. Applying decolonization as both my conceptual and methodological framework, I conduct a thematic analysis of both documents and interviews, as well as a critical discourse analysis combining both sets of data. The results of this study reveal that mental health service providers serving Nunavut largely have de facto language policies. They attribute challenges to offering Inuit Language programming to the dominance of English, hiring practices and funding models. However, it is demonstrated both in documents and by study participants that organizations have found holistic and inclusive ways to not only offer programming in the Inuit Language, but also encourage and increase its use. Local and cultural knowledge prove to be indispensable in understanding systemic challenges to Inuit Language provision in mental health services, as well as how they can be remediated.

Despite huge investments in national English language policies, few South Koreans develop communicable English proficiency. Yet, English language proficiency for all secondary and college students continues to be the goal of these policies (Moodie & Nam, 2015; Ahn, 2015). One of the fundamental reasons for the lack of communicable English proficiency was based on the social phenomenon, called 'hakbuljueui', or academic elitism, in Korea (Kim. T.-Y., 2006) whereby students seem to be instrumentally motivated to learn English only to pass the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), and gain admission to elite Universities (Kim, T.-Y., 2006; Kim, K., 2016). The current study examines whether current South Korean high school are still motivated only by instrumental motivation (the desire to gain entrance into an elite university) or if other motivation also guides their goals of learning English. In addition, the current study sought to understand the relationship between participant's motivation and their English proficiency. The current study examines whether current South Korean high school are still motivated only by instrumental motivation (the desire to gain entrance into an elite university) or if other motivation also guides their goals of learning English. To accomplish these goals, 42 current high school students in South Korea were asked to complete a motivation survey and rate their ability to speak, read, write, and understand English. Motivation was defined and divided into six orientations: instrumental, knowledge, travel, friendship, sociocultural, and integrative. In addition, 27 of the 42 students also participated in simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs). The data revealed that while previous research demonstrated that Korean students show the evidence of instrumental motivation to learn English, the participants in the current study were motivated by both instrumental and other types of motivation. However, their motivation orientation did not predict their self-rated proficiency levels nor their scores on the OPI. The results suggest that students' motivation is expending, and the implication of this study suggests bottom-up policy development that can magnify the various motivations to study English among South Korean students.

Despite huge investments in national English language policies, few South Koreans develop communicable English proficiency. Yet, English language proficiency for all secondary and college students continues to be the goal of these policies (Moodie & Nam, 2015; Ahn, 2015). One of the fundamental reasons for the lack of communicable English proficiency was based on the social phenomenon, called 'hakbuljueui', or academic elitism, in Korea (Kim. T.-Y., 2006) whereby students seem to be instrumentally motivated to learn English only to pass the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), and gain admission to elite Universities (Kim, T.-Y., 2006; Kim, K., 2016). The current study examines whether current South Korean high school are still motivated only by instrumental motivation (the desire to gain entrance into an elite university) or if other motivation also guides their goals of learning English. In addition, the current study sought to understand the relationship between participant's motivation and their English proficiency. The current study examines whether current South Korean high school are still motivated only by instrumental motivation (the desire to gain entrance into an elite university) or if other motivation also guides their goals of learning English. To accomplish these goals, 42 current high school students in South Korea were asked to complete a motivation survey and rate their ability to speak, read, write, and understand English. Motivation was defined and divided into six orientations: instrumental, knowledge, travel, friendship, sociocultural, and integrative. In addition, 27 of the 42 students also participated in simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs). The data revealed that while previous research demonstrated that Korean students show the evidence of instrumental motivation to learn English, the participants in the current study were motivated by both instrumental and other types of motivation. However, their motivation orientation did not predict their self-rated proficiency levels nor their scores on the OPI. The results suggest that students' motivation is expending, and the implication of this study suggests bottom-up policy development that can magnify the various motivations to study English among South Korean students.

Magister Legum - LLM / Namibia is home to a number of linguistic minorities. According to the 2011 census, the Owambo constitute 49.35 per cent of the population, accounting for almost half of the country’s total population.1 The rest of the linguistic groups include the Bushman (San) (0.95 per cent), Caprivians (4.5 per cent), Herero (8.99 per cent), Kavango (10.42 per cent), Damara/Nama (11.32 per cent), Setswana (0.26 per cent), Afrikaans (8.72 per cent), German (0.54 per cent), English (2.43 per cent), other European languages (0.69 per cent), other African languages (1.74 per cent), Asian languages (0.08 per cent) and other unidentified languages (0.02 per cent).2 English is, however, the only official language in terms of the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia, 1990 (“Constitution”).3