Technical and vocational graduates in Ghana are often ill-equipped to become self-reliant or well-fitted into the demands of the job market. This pattern can be examined in terms of the educational language policy implementation that disregards regional linguistic needs. This seems to arise as a result of the medium of instruction that is…

Translating a text from one language to another poses problems to the translator. The task becomes more enormous when translating from a well developed language to a developing one. It even becomes more complex when dealing with a technical text. While the English language belongs to the Anglo-Saxon group, Igbo language belongs to the Congo Basin.…

This paper aims to explore student experiences resulting from collaborative teaching and learning of academic literacy and content knowledge, for multiple objectives at a South African University of Technology. Using the qualitative research approach, undergraduate students who attended the Communication Skills course were randomly selected. Data…

Education for multilingual Physics students in South Africa still has a monolingual bias despite such pedagogy being repeatedly identified as the key factor in students' academic underachievement in the subject. The paper reports on the pivotal role language plays in the comprehension and subsequent academic performance of students in science…

The research investigated the thanking/gratitude strategies of three distinct cultures; Hausa, Chinese and Arabic languages with the aim of finding out the different strategies used by them and how different they are in their use of such strategies. The study employs Cheng (2005) Taxonomy of gratitude strategies in analyzing the data which was…

Khoisan languages are spoken by various culturally diverse communities of Southern Africa. These languages also present an important linguistic diversity. Some of Khoisan languages communities are generally under-researched, marginalized and experiencing sustained sociolinguistic forces that threaten them. For those that have been documented,…

Many African countries exhibit complex patterns of language use because of linguistic pluralism. The situation is often compounded by the presence of at least one foreign language that is either the official or second language. The language situation in Botswana depicts this complex pattern. Out of the 26 languages spoken in the country, including…

Automaticity, or instant recognition of combinations of letters as units of language, is essential for proficient reading in any language. The article explores automaticity amongst competent adult first-language readers of isiZulu, and the factors associated with it or its opposite - active decoding. Whilst the transparent spelling patterns of…

In this paper, we draw on a recent ethnographic study in a rural primary school to illustrate the ways that vestiges of colonialism remain deeply imbricated in contemporary schooling in Ghana. In reference to the history of education, we use evidence from this study to argue that colonial constructions of the African child are reproduced within…

The importance of plagiarism in an academic setting cannot be overlooked. Creating an awareness of plagiarism avoidance amongst students may be achievable and teaching students certain skills to avoid plagiarism, like paraphrasing, may also be possible. Although paraphrasing is one of the most important skills for avoiding plagiarism, it is a real…

Even after decades of uttering platitudes about the languages of Uganda, language policy pronouncements have invariably turned out to be public relations statements rather than blueprints for action. A serious setback for the right to linguistic equality and the right to use Uganda's indigenous languages has largely hinged on the language…

The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) protests at South African universities (2015--2018) were the publicly visible manifestation of deep epistemic problems in the higher education (HE) sector, particularly around questions of whose knowledges are validated and whether these are reflective of students' lived realities. This exploratory research attempted a…

In this article, we describe our collaborative work with the Moçambique Ministry of Education in reimagining primary literacy teacher preparation through an initiative that promotes closer personal (literacy focused) relationships between preservice teachers (formandos) and primary-aged students during the formando's preparation program. Our work…

This article reports on a collaborative action research project, conducted in a pre-primary school in South Central Uganda, which explores the opportunities for children to draw upon and integrate their home and community-based knowledge and experiences through mother tongue (MT) instruction and resources. We use the funds of knowledge (Moll,…

Ghana's language-in-education policy, which mandates the use of L1 as medium of instruction at the lower primary classroom, is not strictly adhered to in majority of Ghanaian classrooms. One factor that has militated against the smooth implementation of the policy is the multilingual nature of Ghana and its classrooms. This sociolinguistic survey,…