Globalisation is increasingly affecting universities worldwide. In African contexts, language policies exhibit an inheritance situation in which countries continue to implement policies which favour colonial languages in education. This paper investigates the Malawian higher education context and the ways in which staff engage with…

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…

Background: Globally, teaching practice has been at the heart of teacher education programmes. For quality teaching and learning, literacy student teachers are expected to develop metacognitive attributes and critical thinking to integrate theory and practice. Because of the dominance of autonomous models in literacy teaching and learning…

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from…

Background: Several isiXhosa home language (HL) learners are excluded from meaningful mathematics learning because they are taught in English. Not only do teachers lack epistemological and pedagogical confidence in using multiple languages when teaching mathematics, but there are no mathematical registers for African languages that allow for…

The Library of Congress has acquired the Omar ibn Said Collection, including an exceptional artifact, the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, written in ancient Arabic by an African enslaved man. In this article, I analytically examine the role of literacy in Omar ibn Said's life as informed by African cultures, ethnicities, histories, languages, and…

Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

The lack of equivalence between African languages on the one hand and Afrikaans and English on the other hand under the governments that ruled South Africa until the collapse of apartheid has seriously undermined the status of African languages. Indigenous South Africans experienced decades of marginalisation -- so much, in fact, that many,…

In most universities in South Africa, English is still preferred as the medium of instruction. However, most schools in South Africa have adopted a home-language education approach. Those school students then have a lower English proficiency compared to other students from English schools. Providing these students with instructional assistance…

Recent research on multilingualism and emotions in the immigrant context indicates that negative emotions such as anxiety related to monolingual or cultural norms may prevail in immigrants' daily lives. Immigrants may respond to negative emotions with avoidance, for instance by avoiding using the language that makes them anxious. This study…

Teaching physical sciences in English as the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) has presented numerous challenges, particularly for learners who are not proficient in the language. The South African government is increasingly considering the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction for subjects such as physical sciences,…

A substantial body of research has examined the role of English in South Africans' linguistic repertoires. Many of these studies have investigated whether a language shift towards English might be underway among first-language (L1) speakers of the indigenous languages. At the same time, the role of English in the repertoires of L1 English speakers…

Despite huge investments in the educational sector, many countries in Africa have not fared well in the education indices. This study examined the effect of teaching equipment and teachers' effort on learning outcomes in 744 Nigerian primary schools using Stochastic Frontier and Ordinary Least Square regression. The mean technical efficiency was…

Bilingual education that incorporates a local language alongside the official language has become an increasingly common approach in sub-Saharan Africa for improving literacy rates and learning outcomes. Evidence suggests that bilingual instruction is largely associated with positive learning and literacy outcomes globally. However, the adoption…

Introduction: Today, classes made up of learners with different linguistic backgrounds are a reality in many countries, including South Africa. Thus, this study was driven by the need to explore the various preconditions that must be met for the inclusion of home languages in an English First Additional Language context in the Further Education…