The study reported in this article sought to explore and observe how grade 9 learners solve real-wor(l)d problems (a) without real context and (b) without real meaning. Learners' abilities to make sense of the decontextualised word problems set in the real world were investigated with regard to learners' use of common sense in relation to problem…

Africans speak African languages in their everyday lives while lessons in school are delivered in an exogenous language. In many places adult education is also carried out in a language the majority of people do not speak. The exogenous languages, which are the languages of the former colonial powers and mastered just by a small African elite, are…

The ethnography of communication, particularly of greetings, among speakers of some Yoruba dialects is the major concern of this paper. The author observed that the much-cherished, rich culture of greetings, among Yoruba, which the author grew up to know, by linguistic globalization and modernization is being eroded fast. The study and…

Technological innovation is only as powerful as the willingness of the people of a particular place to embrace it. Ghana's multilingual landscape has recently been repositioned as a source for early childhood literacy development in order to enfranchise more children in public education. One of the innovative technologies in this new multilingual…

This study investigated a sample of isiXhosa mother tongue-speaking science teachers', their pupils', and adult local community members' awareness of Xhosa indigenous knowledge. It also investigated what aspects of this knowledge they value and think should and could be integrated into the school science curriculum and their reasons for suggesting…

Higher education institutions in South Africa are dominated by English, a result of the colonial history of the country and its education system, a legacy which is intensified by the current dominance of English in higher education worldwide. This paper applies a decolonial theoretical lens to argue that the dominance of English in South African…

After the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, 11 languages (English, Afrikaans and 9 indigenous African languages) were given official status. In the higher education landscape, English remains the dominant language of scholarship. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, English is the main medium of instruction but the institution's language…

This chapter analyses interviews with 13 African scholars from a range of countries who are currently working at a South African university. The interviews explore aspects of their migration journeys and the role that language, particularly the English language, has played in their mobility. The majority of the participants originate from…

Grounded in the examples of four impoverished, relocated youths (two Sesotho-speaking orphans in South Africa and two Mexican immigrants in Canada), we explore cultural factors as potential roots of resilience. We triangulate rich qualitative findings (visual, dialogical, and observational) to foreground the particular, as well as acknowledge the…

This study explores the influences that the Izon language manifests in the syntax of the English of Izon (Nigerian) speakers and makes a clear distinction between the influences that result in errors and those that result in permissible local variations, which indicates that the idea of treating all variations in the syntax of Nigerian English as…

This paper focuses on patterns of post-apartheid learner migration between schools previously segregated along racial lines. South Africa's shift away from cultural and linguistic isolationism and the ways this has impacted educational arrangements in this country, most particularly in relation to the language of learning and teaching, affects…

This article compares the communicative intentions observed in the speech addressed to children of 1;1 and 1;6 years old from three cultural communities: the Netherlands, rural Mozambique, and urban Mozambique. These communities represent two prototypical learning environments and a third hybrid: Western, urban, middle-class families; non-Western,…

In this dissertation, several related aspects of arguments to ditransitive verbs are explored. The aim is to discover in what ways certain asymmetries in what is frequently referred to as a "symmetric object" language are interconnected while still allowing the other symmetric object behavior. These asymmetries are: (1) The requirement that the…

Melbourne's linguistic and cultural diversity has continually changed in response to global economic forces and shifting patterns of war and conflict. Immigrant and refugee communities have arrived with different skills, educational and professional profiles, and cultural and religious values. The ecological niches of three contrasting linguistic…

This article reports on the findings of a school ethnographic study of language-in-education policy implementation carried out during a time of intra-tribal conflict in the Sabaot language group. The conflict led to the displacement of significant numbers of Sabaot people from their homes in a linguistically homogenous Sabaot area. Several…