Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African suburban schools

Language ideologies and epistemic exclusion

“…These findings align not only with scholars who argue that African educators and the education system continue to struggle with symbolic violence and the many legacies of colonialism (Bamgboṣ e 2000; Bunyi 2001), but also who document the power of ideologies for reinforcing socioeconomic hierarchies (Alexander 2007;Asker and Martin-Jones 2013;Djité 2008;Heller 1999;Lin 1996Lin , 2001Makoe and McKinney 2014;Martin-Jones and Heller 1996a;McKinney et al 2015). In the present study, when a monolingual habitus takes precedence over the multilingual realities of Kenyans, community languages that might otherwise serve as a resource or vehicle for expressing culture, voice, and identity instead are illegitimatized at school, transforming an asset into a liability.…”

“…As such, while failures to align with legitimated languages may arise due to inability or inadequate access to them, such nonalignment serves as a sign of failure in general. From this failure, many negative social consequences follow (Hanks 2005) or are anxiously perceived as following inevitably (Makoe and McKinney 2014;McKinney et al 2015;Muthwii 2004;Smith 2001). …”

“…English-only instruction and monoglossic language policies have yielded relatively lower educational achievement for rural students, in part because they rarely have an opportunity to use English outside of the classroom (Brock-Utne 2001;Muthwii 2004). Studies in several multilingual settings have shown similar deficit ideologies towards multilingual learners and their home languages (see, for example, Heller 1999;Lin 1996;Makoe and McKinney 2014;McKinney et al 2015;Smith 2001).…”

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

“…Further description of translanguaging practices of teachers and learners such as those in the present study to discover, for example, how ubiquitous the multidirectional switching described here is in multilingual classrooms and to test whether the affordances of this switching are similar in different contexts such as highly linguistically diverse urban classrooms. Lastly, in a multilingual country such as South Africa it is imperative for teachers to recognise the heteroglossic nature of the discursive practices of learners in their classrooms (Makoe & McKinney, 2014) and to be able to draw on the diverse linguistic resources in pursuit of learning. In teacher education, the goal should be to enable teachers to develop a set of translanguaging competencies suited to their classroom's particular linguistic environment while gaining an understanding of how the use of a range of learners' linguistic resources positions them more strongly as capable learners.…”

“…One of the purposes of this paper is to illuminate the different discourses which are used by all classroom participants in the joint construction of mathematical meaning (Barnes, 1992;Edwards & Mercer, 1987;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Mercer, 1995). I have named different discourses (such as 'Mathematical English', introduced below) in the analysis somewhat uncomfortably given my concurrence with the recent rejection of the notion that named languages are discrete, stable, bounded entities (Blommaert & Backus, 2011;Creese & Blackledge, 2010;Makoe & McKinney, 2014). However, the identification of spoken registers, particularly, which are employed in the classroom, sheds light on how participants are using language for learning and how successfully.…”