Reading fluency is a skill foundational to academic performance, and acquiring this skill in early grades is crucial. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, reading levels of students are far below grade level, and Malawi is no exception. Research suggests that students, particularly in consistently spelled languages, acquire automaticity most easily by…

Learner autonomy is a fundamental phenomenon in the teaching and learning of languages. The growth of digital technology and the Internet appears to have changed the manifestation of learner autonomy, particularly in Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs). The purpose of this phenomenological research study was to examine the experiences of LCTL…

A Grade 4 English language teacher in a township school in Cape Town, South Africa, in her quest to equip learners with new target language resources, is not held back by the perceived boundaries dividing named languages. Instead she employs language in creative and goal-directed ways that we believe have not received enough focused linguistic…

Background: One of the methods receiving the current attention in addressing poor performance and low learning achievements among lower primary school learners is through remedial teaching. The approach to provide remedial support was informed by Vygotsky's social development theory. Aim: The objective of this study was to support primary school…

This article discusses the resource implications of Malawi's new language-in-education policy. Whilst previous publications on the English as a medium of teaching and learning policy, which was announced in Malawi in 2014, have sharply criticised and dismissed the new language policy from pedagogical and other educational grounds, the current…

Background: In South Africa, and in many other African countries, official language-in-education policy supports the use of learners' primary language(s) in early schooling. In reality, texts in the language(s) of the former colonial power are dominant, with high-interest texts in languages familiar to young learners in short supply or…

In this article we provide a discussion of present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people whose heritage is complex: their history can be traced back to the early days of the colonial settlement, reflecting the interactions and cohabitation of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves and the European…

Teachers are a crucial part of young people's social ecologies. Considering that black South African adolescent girls remain the most marginalised group in South Africa, the purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study has been to explore if and how teachers champion resilience among black adolescent girls living in rural contexts of…

Linguists tend to believe that total complexity of human languages is invariable. In order to test this hypothesis empirically, we need to calculate the complexity in different domains of language structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. In this paper I provide some guidelines for documenting tonal systems and evaluating their complexity. I…

This article presents the translation and adaptation process of a mathematics test for the acquisition of key mathematical (arithmetic) concepts by children from four to eight years of age. The origin of this test was in Germany, whence it was sourced by researchers at the University of Johannesburg. A conceptual model of hierarchical mathematics…

Rationalist modes of inquiry have dominated the cognitive science of music over the past several decades. This dissertation contests many rationalist assumptions, including its core tenets of nativism, modularity, and computationism, by drawing on a wide range of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive music theory, as…

Background: This article investigated the potential of Grade 3 English Second Language (ESL) teachers' vocabulary development practices to equip learners in English-deprived environments with English vocabulary requisite for transition to Grade 4 where English is the Language of Learning and Teaching and where learning to read gives way to reading…

Language policy debates in South Africa concern only Black African language speaking children rather than White English and Afrikaans speaking children. These debates construct Black African children as learners with deficits and fail to acknowledge their language resources. At the same time, policy makers fail to critique the unjust system to…

The purpose of this study was to provide a systematic review of research that has been carried out between 2006 and 2016 on the role of language in early grade (Grades 1-4) mathematics teaching and learning in three countries--Kenya, Malawi and South Africa. These countries were selected because they have similar characteristics: teaching and…

The University of KwaZulu-Natal has a bilingual language policy (2006) where students may receive instruction in isiZulu as well as in English. An online survey was carried out for all academic and support staff to gauge their linguistic capacity in isiZulu. Staff profiles were created in relation to their respective Colleges, Schools and…