While many U.S. residents like listening to African stories, hearing African stories is difficult because designing effective curricula and teaching about African contexts appear to be a major challenge in U.S. social studies education. Drawing on postcolonial theory, we analyzed the discourses of two contemporaneous historical documents to…

Whole-body sense-making offers insights for the analysis of identity work in learning in multilingual classroom contexts. The concept has the potential to draw together two strands of classroom discourse scholarship, namely multilingual and multimodal discourse studies. The data presented in this paper constitutes a moment of whole-body…

There is an urgent need for more ethical and equitable approaches to reading instruction for young emergent bilingual children in English medium classrooms. Translanguaging pedagogies are one approach that may address this issue as they encourage emergent bilinguals to use all of their linguistic and semiotic resources during reading. This study…

The aim of conducting this study came from a need to explore contrastive study in using metadiscourse features between English and Hausa in research article genre. This study investigated what metadiscourse features are frequently used across two languages in research article genre. A sub-corpus of ten research articles was compiled from each…

Calls for a decolonized curriculum in South Africa are gaining momentum. Contrary to the school curriculum that privileges knowledge from a western perspective, indigenous knowledge systems appreciate and draw from local content and forms of knowing. A number of studies have expressed the value of indigenous knowledge systems, and the need for…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…

The study was a linguistic examination of the use of lexical cohesive devices in Ngugi Wa Thiong 'O's "Decolonising the Mind"- an autobiography. The study was aimed at revealing how Ngugi - an African L2 writer, deployed lexical cohesive devices to achieve cohesion and coherence and how this has contributed to the meaning of his…

Increasing international mobility has raised awareness on the fluidity and porous nature of boundaries not only between nation states, but also between named languages. Despite the complexities of overlaps across a wider spectrum of languages and classrooms worldwide, orthodox education programmes still reflect monolingual and epistemic biases,…

The low enrolment, lack of interest, exacerbated by the general poor performance in physical science in South Africa paints a gloomy picture about the status of physical science in the country. Despite the fact that there might be other factors at play, one factor which cannot be ignored is the discourse about the use of language in the science…

The nature of discourse within classrooms strongly predicts students' ability to think about, around, and with text and content (i.e. comprehension and critical-analytic thinking). However, little is known about the nature of classroom discourse in remote, rural South African schools, a context in which students face well-documented language…

Background: The teaching of writing in English First Additional Language (EFAL) classrooms remains less explored in the Further Education and Training Phase (FET) in South Africa. This is so despite research showing a decline in the writing skills of second language learners, especially at the FET phase, calling attention to how writing is taught.…

Although eye-tracking technologies such as Tobii-T120/TX and Eye-Tribe are steadily becoming ubiquitous, and while their appropriation in education can aid teachers to collect robust information on how students move their eyes when reading and engaging with different learning objects, many teachers of Luganda language are yet to gain experiences…

While many young learners of the 21st century have grown up with, and generally prefer to learn using Emerging Technologies (ETs), few teachers of Luganda language graduate with learning experiences of integrating ETs in their teaching. One of the most crucial stages of gaining experiences in any subject or object of interest is making Abstract…

This article examines everyday classroom peer interaction among emergent multilingual high school students who are new to the United States, new to school, new to English, and new to alphabetic print literacy. Data were collected through observation and video recording within a daily 90-minute, English language and literacy block class over the…

Research in educational linguistics is now challenging the efficacy of monolingual approaches that often dominate educational practices in multilingual settings. In most African nations where multilingualism is the norm, there remains a persistent reluctance by educational stakeholders (principals, teachers, parents, and students) to embrace…