Do we still have a mother tongue?Fluid identities and languaging in multilingual settings

How do we reconstruct our linguistic identities in the 21st century?
One of the realizations  in the 21st century is that boundaries between languages can no longer be defended. As different from the Medieval period when there was a 'fear of the foreigner', the 21st century has created  discursive spaces where the 'child of the soil'  and the foreigner cohabit the same geographical spaces and blend their languages in very complex way that the very notion of a stable language itself is questionable. Indeed,  we begin to see more  practices that show overlaps between languages  world wide. 

In South Africa,  is a typical example of integrated multilingualism (although the enlightenment ideology of one-ness governs management of the languages and school policies). Multilingualism is enshrined in the Constitution that recognizes 11 official languages to ensure parity of esteem and redress past linguistic imbalances where African languages were reduced to low level 'tongues'. With the advent of  the new sociopolitical dispensation that started in 1994, however, the local communities have increasingly mixed in sharing spaces and languages. 

I carried out a research  which  shows that university students from Black townships refer to their home language as kasi-taal- a hybrid language form that draws from all of the South African official languages. In other words, they do not have a mother tongue or mother tongues because they acquired at least 6 languages before they were 7 years old. A hybrid form that draws from languages across the board is preferred to any of the individual official languages. To make the point about 'leaking boundaries' between languages, I use translanguaging to explain that fluidity, fuzziness  and versatility in language use have become naturalized. Because it is though language that one BECOMES a better entity of oneself, the speakers' identities are equally fluid. It is for this reason, I argue, that the Black township dwellers do not have a mother tongue; instead they are languaging. They have naturalized alternation of languages and use this fluid system to be who they choose to be and to make sense of the world. 

TO READ MORE ON THIS SUBJECT, see the article below: "Fluid identity construction in language contact zones: metacognitive reflections on Kasi-taal languaging practices"Alert me

DOI:

10.1080/13670050.2014.953774

Leketi Makalela^a*

Abstract

This study investigated how semi-urban, multi-ethnic and multilingual students in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, negotiate their new identities through languaging experiences. Metacognitive reflections of their recreated language spaces were collected through 20 written narratives, which were analysed using a universalist reductionist approach. The results of the study revealed highly complex identifying processes that mark fluid, multiple affiliations and mobile and creative negotiation of an identity matrix through a hybrid language form, Kasi-taal, which breaks boundaries and embeds linguistic systems that were traditionally treated as discrete units. Using a translanguaging framework, I argue that the languaging strategies articulated in the narratives can be valorised to offset the symbolic violence of monoglossic ideologies that are dominant in our classrooms. Recommendations for further studies on identity-building spaces in multilingual language contact zones as well as the logic of hybrid linguistic repertoires are highlighted at the end of the paper.

• View full text
• Download full text
  
  

LAW OF LEAST EFFORT cultivated at Balang PLUS Workshop

Balang Plus, which is an advanced version of the Balang Foundation's literacy programmes, held its first mentoring and coaching workshop for 10 high school learners who graduated from primary schools under the tutelage of the Foundation. The workshop was held on 12 and 13 September, 2014 at the MJ Gateway Lodge in Polokwane, Limpopo Province. The Plus side of Balang (Reading +) upholds Balang Foundation’s catalyst role as an active player in engineering social change through reading literacy. After three years of training and support, the bursars were fuming with confidence and ready to share their knowledge and habits into the communities where they lived. The high school learners were given additional two years of adjustment support with increased funding to buy new school uniform, purchase extra reading materials and receive coaching on life skills as teenagers. The workshop was facilitated by a team of nine literacy and life skills experts: Leketi Makalela, Mpho Seerane, Hendrica Malete, Albert and Boitumelo of the University of Limpopo’s performing Arts as well as four pre-service teachers from the University of the Witwatersrand: Nondumiso Zulu, Banele Zwane, Nozipho Sibanda and Melica Thewe. 

The bursars had been tasked with giving back to their communities through a “read-for-a-neigbour” programme and in doing so expanding Balang Foundation’s mission to promote reading literacy in the communities. This workshop session involved conversations around how the "read for a neighbor" programme went over 8 months, with each of the bursars narrating their experiences of literacy in their communities.

The evening of their arrival included writing sessions that involved brainstorming on how to be a responsible citizen- mainly around literacy. These writings were shared and discussed with the whole team of nineteen attendees as a basis for the coaching that dwelt on self-knowledge, self-management and self-efficacy.  In addition, the learners were asked to define who they are in an attempt to determine their self-awareness- something that is a proxy for growing within their remit of who they are. The bursars had shown growth and maturity as evidenced through the high level of discussions, presentations and questioning when compared to the first time they were awarded the Balang grants  in 2010. Some of the quotable quotes from their responses are:

“One has to be responsible for her/his  existence in an effective and efficient manner”- Shane

 “ One needs to live a purposeful life” - David

“ Being responsible means to pass at the end of the year—to make parents proud and to use one’s internal powers and perform better than one’s parents”- Desney

“To look after yourself- taking risks and stop playing a victim mentality. To  be better than yesterday by focusing on the positives”- Mogau

“To take action---repair; no excuses---telling the truth and watching one’s words- being the star of one’s life”- Sello.

“To give no excuses; star small and stop procrastination”- Lesedi.

“Doing anything you want to do…taking correct decisions and  being forward looking” –Brightness.

“To choose to feel or think the way you do. Protecting and nurturing your emotional well-being and managing time”- Mojalefa

Overall, the workshop was successful in raising awareness in the learners who all realized that they needed to focus on their strengths (what they have, not what they don't have) as understood from the principle of the “Law of least effort”. In other words, to find their purposes, meaning and who they are in relation to others and the world, they needed to focus on things they can do with ease (what comes more naturally to them, yet difficult or hard for people around them) to maximize their chances of success in life.  The Reading mission of Balang Foundation has turned their world around to be inquisitive and ask deep questions about themselves till it gets crystal clear: they are who they are! 

Report prepared by Leketi Makalela, Chairman of Balang Foundation

Who they are, what they are and why they are: reading, leading, self and language

Balang Foundation held its annual excursion programme in order to accelerate its bursars’ self-development in three areas: reading, self-management and leadership skills and habits. The excursion was held on the 22 and 23 August 2014 at MJ Gateway Lodge- about 3 kilometres west of the City of Polokwane, Limpopo Province.  Fifteen primary school learners from various schools in the Province were transported to the venue, with a few accompanied by siblings, teachers and parents. This group included new 5 learners from the 2014 cohort and the other 10 came from the 2012 and 2013 cohorts.  The learners were excited to be away from home and to interact with peers and role models outside of their normal daily experiences.

On the first day of the excursion (22 August), the learners arrived at the University of Limpopo’s Performing Arts Centre as a meeting point and a place to get inspiration from university students who model success, resilience and drive to put dreams to a test. This way the learners were able to see themselves beyond primary school and to invigorate their dreams of being educated and successful in life. After this university stop-over, they proceeded to the workshop venue where they began with team building activities till the late hours of the night. The workshop facilitators provided them with English and home language reading materials to read at night in preparation for presentations, reflections and discussions that were scheduled for the following day.

The second day of the excursion included more team building and relaxation exercises, tongue twisters and writing activities that included reflections on the evening experiences at the Lodge. Together with reading tasks, these activities fed into the Foundation’s mission to build confidence in the learners so they maximize the experience of living within the remit of who they are: self awareness, self esteem and self actualization. The learners understood three key ideas around the workshop: who they are (Balang Ambassadors), what they are (Future leaders) and why they are (to be the change they want to see).

During the activities, the learners wrote short stories and were engaged in high level discussion points, focusing on evaluation of issues they considered ‘social ills’ in their immediate communities, their schools and families. The themes that emerged from their free writings included a pattern of homosexual tendencies at their schools, bullying at schools, gratitude to Balang Foundation for having turned their lives around and brought hope for a successful future. This is a prototypical example of accolades to Balang Foundation:

Ke a leboga Balang Foundation. Ge nka be e se ka wena, ga ke tsebe gore nkabe ke le kae. Ke a leboga go menagane ke re Modimo a lefe mahlatse le mahlogonolo.

‘Thank you Balang Foundation; if it wasn’t for you, I would not have reached this far in life. I say thank you and may God accord you fortunes and blessings.’

Other themes included unresolved tension between home language and English at school, death of parents, harsh conditions of being a child, discrimination, struggle for water and social grants, boys disrespecting teachers, dreams to succeed, and love for parents. 

One of the outstanding experiences in this workshop was training for the children’s use of two languages to acquire vocabulary and adopt bilingual reading strategies. Giving them readings in both their home language and English was meant to enhance simultaneous (as opposed to sequential) development of reading skills and habits in two languages- something they don’t usually do at school. The Foundation had taken a decision that reading cannot be developed in isolated languages among bilinguals or multilingual children. Comparison and contrasting reading between two languages provided them versatility, flexibility, multiple access points to knowledge in more than one language- biliteracy skills they need for the future. The facilitators noticed that the bursars heartily enjoyed the experience of exchanging languages because it valorized what they brought with them into the reading space. It became apparent that home language represented who they are and English doubled their ‘who-ness’ and prepared them for a curriculum that is carried out through its medium. The children had reading sessions and opportunities to alternate languages of input and output (listening in one language and responding in another language; reading in one language and writing in another= translanguaging). This exercise proved successful in engaging the learners’ thinking processes, enhancing deeper understanding and affirming a sense of who they were becoming: future home language and English users. The enthusiasm recorded while they were receiving stories in one language and re-telling them in another language was encouraging that it might be possible to explore this as an option to support literacy in more than one language in their classrooms.

Towards the end of the workshops, the bursars were coached on self-management, the values of Balang Foundation as ambassadors and on how to stay true to who they are. The principles were stated in English and Sepedi (their home language) as follows:

·      Be who you are (Le se be bomarata helele!)

·      Know who you want to be (tseba gore o nyaka go ba eng kamoso)

·      Believe in the future (Dumela gore bokamoso bo tla ba bjo bokaone)

·      Make reading your best friend: the only way you succeed (Balang!)

·      Schedule your life: Humans are not animals; they reflect and plan

·      Spend your 168 hours per week wisely (nako e bohlokwahlokwa!)

·      Prioritize (Kgetha tseo de lego bohlokwa

After the coaching session, the bursars filled in a grid to start scheduling of their daily activities and committed to reading and sharing their stories for at least 15 minutes before they sleep. 

Overall, the excursion programme was successful in instilling confidence in the bursars, giving them assurances that success is within their reach, making them take charge of their lives, to control and manage their schedules, and read more and more. In this way, they knew who they are (ambassadors), what they are (future leaders), and why they are (to become the change they want to see!)

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 50^th 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 21^st 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!

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.

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.