Multilingual Universities in South Africa Reflecting Society in Higher Education

Focusing on the use of African languages in higher education, this book showcases South African higher education practitioners' attempts to promote a multilingual ethos in their classes. It is a first-time overview of multilingual teaching and learning strategies that have been tried and tested in a number of higher education institutions in South Africa. Despite language-in-education policies that extol the virtues of multilingualism, practice remains oriented towards English-only learning and teaching. In the multilingual contexts of local campuses, this book shows how students and lecturers attempt to understand their multiple identities and use the available languages to create multilingual learning environments.

Liesel Hibbert is Professor of Applied Language Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Her research interests include language development in higher education, linguistic diversity and linguistic ethnography.Christa van der Walt is Professor of Language Education in the Department of Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University. Her research interests include language-in-education, English language teaching in multilingual contexts and multilingual education. She is the author of Multilingual Higher Education: Beyond English-medium Orientations (2013).