Abstract

There is evidence in South Africa that multilingual language-in-education policies are not realised in practice. Researchers offer comprehensive lists of reasons for the observed policy failure. International and national researchers identify a lack of congruence between language-in-education policies and the natural language practices of learners as a contributing factor in the perceived policy disaster. The central argument of this article is that an understanding of the nature of the dominant language constellations in the multilingual repertoires of South African urban learners can advance thinking about improved language-in-education policies and practices. The main findings are that different constellations of languages are active in different domains for the participants of the study. For example, reading contributed to the learning of Southern Sotho and English for the participants in the study. These findings should be used more actively to develop Southern Sotho-English language-in-education policies and practices in this context.

摘要

南非有证据表明，实践中并未实现多语言教育政策。研究人员提供了所观察到的政策失败原因的全面列表。国际和国家研究人员发现，教育语言政策与学习者的自然语言习惯之间缺乏一致性，这是造成人们认为的政策灾难的原因。本文的中心论点是，对南非城市学习者多语种库中主要语言星座的性质的理解可以促进有关改进教育语言政策和实践的思考。主要发现是，对于研究的参与者，不同的语言群在不同的领域中活跃。例如，阅读有助于研究的参与者学习南索托语和英语。在这种情况下，应该更积极地利用这些发现来制定南方索托英语教育政策和做法。