English As a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity : Examining South Africa?s Higher Education Crisis

Hibbert explores South Africa’s higher education crisis utilising case studies and first-hand experiences with English as the language of instruction. The historical overview provides a framework with which to understand the complicated nature of using English as a language of instruction in South Africa, past and present. Student narratives are presented to illustrate mainly breakthroughs, but also challenges.

An overview is provided, of imported English teaching methodologies and how they have emerged and developed in the local educational system over decades. It is demonstrated how these methodologies relate to socio-economic and political events and trends at each juncture. By applying defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation, students’ translanguaging struggles are recorded and discussed, both pre-pandemic and in the pandemic period. The experiences of non-monolingual English-speaking staff and students, and of local English/African language bilinguals is foregrounded, as they are by far the majority in South African higher education and schools. The relevance of the experiences and learning paths of those staff and students is enhanced.

This book aids lecturers across disciplines and English language facilitators in the improvement of English acquisition curricula through exposure to arguments, case studies and learning path narratives in this volume, and prompts and inspires researchers to develop further theories and experiments in their own context.

Liesel Hibbert is Professor of English Education in the Faculty of Education at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Before that she was Professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town in 2000. Her research has been mainly cross-disciplinary i.e. global trends in youth development, literacy and language policy, language development in higher education, political rhetoric, linguistic ethnography in the classroom and South African writing. Her work has been published in, among other journals, Journal of English as an International Language, the Review of Research in Education, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and in a variety of books and local journals. Her two previous books are Multilingual Universities in South Africa (a co-edited volume) and The Linguistic Landscape in Post-apartheid South Africa. In addition, Liesel Hibbert has designed numerous English Studies courses and a graduate course in language acquisition and has supervised student research on translanguaging as pedagogy for MA and PhD projects.