Analyzing university language policies in South Africa: Critical discourse and policy analysis frameworks

Magister Artium - MAAt the dawn of democracy, Higher Education in South Africa was in dire need of change. One of the essential initiatives in response to transformation in Higher Education was the mandate from the Ministry of Education for each university to develop a language policy. Along with other initiatives, the language policies were intended to address issues of access and success in Higher Education, especially given the unequal opportunities people of colour had been given to access Higher Education in the country’s apartheid past. Although there is widespread acknowledgement of the barrier which language poses to epistemological access, and concern that in Higher Education the linguistic dimensions of transformation are yet to be institutionalised, the explanation commonly offered hinges on the non-implementation of university language policies. The relevant discourse presupposes that existing language policy instruments are otherwise adequate to transform language practices in the country’s universities. As a consequence, there has been relatively little research problematizing the texts of university language policies from the standpoint of policy design and those interests which conceivably make language transformation difficult. Against this backdrop, this thesis draws on work in policy analysis and critical discourse analysis to analyse the language policies of Stellenbosch University and of the University of the Western Cape. The detailed textual analysis to which both language policy documents are subjected draws on experiential analysis, demodalisation, activation, the use/non-use of conditional clauses and modality. The analysis reveals that even though the policies express unequivocal commitment to the country’s multilingual heritage and to the promotion of Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, they betray a pattern of differential commitment to English versus Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Together with the key informant interviews, the analysis suggests that many of the concerns regularly expressed around a transformation of language practices are issues of policy design which have their origin in both the discourses around the language policy texts, and the policy texts themselves

Speaking with a forked tongue about multilingualism in the language policy of a South African university

As part of a broader student campaign for ‘free decolonized education’, protests over language policies at select South African universities between 2015 and 2016 belied widespread positive appraisals of these policies, and revealed what is possibly an internal contradiction of the campaign. The discourse prior to the protests (e.g. “excellent language policies but problematic implementation”), during the protests (e.g. silence over the role of indigenous African languages in the “Afrikaans must fall” versus “Afrikaans must stay” contestations), and after the protests (e.g. English becoming a primary medium in some institutional policy reviews) warrant attention to critical literacy in language policy scholarship. Based on a theoretical account of speaking with a forked tongue, this article analyzes the language policy text of one South African university. The analysis suggests, simultaneously, why similar policies have tended to be positively appraised, why students’ calls for policy revisions were justified, but why the changes clamoured for arguably amount to complicity in self-harm

Competition drives the evolution of emergent neutrality in the dietary niches of mammalian herbivores

The coexistence of multiple species competing for a finite set of resources is a widely debated topic in community ecology. Species with strongly overlapping niches are expected to drive each other towards exclusion, but such species may also coexist if they have similar competitive abilities. This compromise can lead to a peculiar pattern of clumped coexistence, where multiple species share similar niches, leaving gaps open in the theoretically available niche space. Large mammal herbivores may be a good example of this, where species’ dietary niches clump as either grazers, browsers, or intermediate-feeders, rather than being continuously distributed over the resource gradient. Here, we develop a model of such emergent neutrality amongst species competing for a set of predefined resources each distributed along a finite niche axis. The model is commensurate with stable isotope niches, thus allowing us to compare its predictions with empirical evidence for changes in community niche structure over evolutionary time. We present stable carbon and oxygen isotope evidence for six discontinuous Late Quaternary assemblages from the central interior of South Africa, demonstrating the emergence of a clumped niche structure from an initial pattern of strongly overlapping diets. We show that species tend to cluster on parts of the niche axis where resource availability is highest, mirroring the proliferation of grazer species as landscapes became more grass-dominated. However, the presence of competition means that species’ niches continue to differentiate, explaining the persistence of browser and intermediate-feeder species even in these open, predominantly treeless landscapes. These results highlight that species interactions are a necessary factor for robust inferences about the evolutionary dynamics of palaeocommunities