Wednesday, December 14, 2011

African Studies Association Presidential Fellow- Reflections


I was privileged to receive an African Studies Presidential Fellowship for 2011, which entailed visits to Rutgers University and the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress and attendance of the 50th African Studies Association Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Throughout the tenure of the fellowship I refined my academic mantra: linguistic and literacy interface.  The concept of interface blends different modes (multimodality), different languages (multilingualism) and skills (multiliteracy) and interrogates fluidity of their meeting points.  There are three basic questions defining my agenda: What happens when African children juggle between two systems to develop reading and/or multimodal literacy? What happens when they are taught in languages they do not understand? What happens when African languages take an agentive role in localizing English?
I carried with myself these defining questions as I visited classes at Rutgers University to do guest lectures.  The first class focused on language politics, allowing me space to relate the story of South Africa’s bold language policy that recognized 11 official languages and how this policy should be interpreted with a series of larger socio-political processes that gave birth to it: Dutchification (1652), Anglicization (1795), Afrikanerization (1948), Soweto student uprising (1976) and democratisation (1994).  My lecture showed that there are historically ordained ideological issues that limit utilization of indigenous African languages such as negative attitudes and mythical economic reasons about costs.  Constitutional emphasis on the need to utilize previously marginalized languages, however, remains a positive story so far in the modern history of African languages.
In next topic on children’s literacies, I argued that visual mode and other neglected modes of communication have proliferated children’s lives, but the schools and parents seem to be “old” in keeping up with the trends and therefore failing the children who are otherwise intelligent. Using reading images as a theoretical construct, I presented on the grammar of the visual design, which needs to be interpreted with verbal grammar as we read multimodal texts. I further presented results of an empirical study I conducted in South Africa, showing a commonsense, but deep reality:  the need to rethink literacy and prepare our 21st century children.
The Library of the Congress offered a unique opportunity to research language development over time, especially language cognition, language-in education, and the missionary “misinventions” and “disinventions” of African language orthographies and their Tower of the Babel misconceptions that exaggerated multilingualism in Africa. My public lecture on Challenges and Prospects of 11 Official Language policy in South Africa was well received by the audience at the Library and the questions raised deepened my drive to do further research on the historical accounts of language policy development.
The fellowship ended with a special session on New English in South Africa at the ASA Annual Meeting.  I debunked the myth that African languages are passive recipients of English’s bully blows. Instead, they are catalysts of change in taming the shrew in the new African sociolinguistic milieu.
Overall,  a fruitful fellowship tenure!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Children's literacies in changing times


I gave a talk at the Camdem Campus of Rutgers University yesterday (9 November, 2011) on "Multimodality: impact on children's literacies". Ways of knowing and modes of communication have changed with the advent of technology. This implies that we cannot take for granted the visuals (and other modes) that inundate us on a daily basis. Do we know what they mean and do we have a langauge to talk about them? The real issue however is how these multiple modes connive to create meaning. If we don't, we might consider ourselves illiterate (digital refugees!).
Let's start from the beginning of things: Is there a relationship between the letters MAN and the concept/signified "man"? The relationship, if any, is arbitrary and children know this already even before they lean how to speak, write or read. They want to deal with CONCRETE represenation of reality. They choose drawing and creating pictures to communicate and represent real life objects. Just give them a writing pad and a pencil to see, but we probably may not see and understand that language...adults are in this connection  considered visually illiterate.  The least we can do is to provide writing spaces and tools even if we don't understand.
Suprisingly, most  adults attempt to mis-educate the kids and support the education system that has made up all these squiggles of letters that do not make sense in real life. Instead of building on their strength, the school system gradually takes away opportunities for multiliterate development  and frustrate intelligent kids. This is in the same way that I understand why some education systems ask children to "swim" or "sink" through the medium of a language they do not understand as early as grade 4. This is a transition from concrete operations to abstract thinking. Is it really possible to do abstract thinking in the language one does not understand? Where else is this happening except in Africa? Doesn't this explain, at least in part, why South African kids read at 35% at grade 3 and then regress to 28% at grade 6? Hmmm, something cognitively criminal is smelling....Cognitive effects that set up the children for failure in life.
Just to show how conservative we are in the larger scheme of things, I asked a group of American students today if they could consider using sms language, promote it and use it as official if they were in a position to change policy...there was a resounding NO eventhough literally everyone one them uses this "dialect-free" language. If you agree with them, wait for the next 30 years to be proved wrong. Literacies have shifted with time....we the illiterate ones (adults) should try catch up with them and be ahead of the game instead of being gatekeepers.


Monday, November 7, 2011

Language development and society in South Africa

After giving a talk at Rutgers University, New Jersey today (07 November, 2011), it fully occured to me that indigenous African languages have had a long history of subjugation that even the cosmetic policy reforms of multilingualism do little to advance their cause unless more radical, politically-willed steps are put in place. Many people often think that languages should be developed first in order to be used, but I tend to believe that not using them is in fact a cause for their under-development. The first step towards development is to use them... and they can borrow words and concepts from English through normal processes of langauge contact and evolution in the same way that developed langauges like English did and still do today....the inkhorn words derived from French and classical languages like Latin before it was developed in the middle ages are best examples to show that no language is instrinsically developed.

Instead of systematic language planning expected of policy makers, we saw language "happening" in a series of  lingusitic "wars", indigenous African languages had to survive against exogenous languages (which have over time become African too) and agents. The history reads as thus:  Dutchification (1652), Anglicization (1875), Missionary lingusitic disinvention (1800), Dutch-English reunion (1910), the rise of Afrikaans in 1925, Afrikanerization (1948); Soweto Student uprising (1976) and Democratisation (1994). All of these historical epochs did very little to turn the fortunes for African langauges as languages of prestige in all domains of life. It is almost 15 years since multilingualism was proclaimed as a norm (1996), but many children are still caught up in  the sink or swim subtractive bilingualism default policy (learning through one's home langage for the first 3 years and then making a swift transition to learning through English) that was first introduced by the missionaries in the 1800. This policy that cuts across many Anglophone African countries has been insensitive to the "threshold" levels and levels of readiness of the kids...that learners have to LEARN in a language they do not understand is still incomprehesible to me...defies the logic of education, which is to acquire knowledge and use it for personal and social advancement.

It is important to recall that the missionaries' goal was to quickly christianize the natives through their home languages and thus 3 years was deemed necessary for biblical studies. They knew that comprehesion was not possible in an exogenous language and thus home language or so called mother tongue was the logical option to spread the word of God. When the mission was accomplished, the colonizing agents wanted to transfer their culture through their languages by replacing African cultural and linguistic reality with their own. Equally, they knew that the best way was to cultivate this before children passed their critical age--puberty--- to master a behaviour and start thinking in the colonial language as early as grade 4. This is the story of a sink or swim policy cutting across many African countries to date. Ironically, change has been claimed when in fact things remained the same as far as enliteration of African children in schools despite the odd reality that they are underachieving in schools. Cognitive underdevelopment, literacy development failures, semi-lingualism, skills shortage, unemployment, and general dependence on the government by  a large section of the population are some of the harsh consequences of failed language policy of a developing nation.