Graduation - 2024 - December (Open Access)

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Browsing Graduation - 2024 - December (Open Access) by Author "Anthonie, Alexa Nicole"

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    A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of an Under-Researched (Higher) Education Setting: The Heteroglossic Realities of the South African Technical Vocational Education and Training Sector
    (Stellenbosch University, 2024-12) Anthonie, Alexa Nicole ; Oostendorp, Marcelyn; Busch, Brigitta; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    This dissertation by publication explores the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector in South Africa, delving into the critical issue of decolonisation as it relates to language. The TVET sector has been historically marginalised in the academic sphere and in relation to language research. Besides a dearth of language studies on TVET, there is no comprehensive language policy at the sector level and a lack of publically accessible language policies for either of the 50 TVET colleges in the country. This research argues that coloniality has deeply affected the South African TVET sector, but that language, specifically the diverse voices and perspectives of TVET students, holds the potential for decolonial change. By employing Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud 2001), a theoretical framework located within decolonial theory (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), the dissertation sheds light on how racialised and colonial understandings of ability, labour and language have and continue to shape the TVET sector. The dissertation utilises a nested single-case study made up of three sub-units of analysis. Each sub-unit is explored in a separate paper and the findings of all three papers are synthesised in the final chapter of the dissertation. Paper 1 is a document analysis of policies relevant to the definition of Higher Education and TVET institutions, the qualifications that each awards, and the requirements for accessing either of these institutions. Paper 2 is an arts-informed exploration of the lived language experiences of TVET students. Paper 3 is an autoethnography exploring the experiences of teaching English First Additional Language (FAL) in the sector. The research findings show that TVET is discursively constructed as a subaltern, that students’ narratives are a complex interplay between compliance with and resistance to colonial understandings of language, and that failure and vulnerability can be used productively in language teaching. The dissertation also contributes theoretically to Linguistic Citizenship by following recent trends to conceptualise Linguistic Citizenship in relation to vulnerability and failure (Stroud et al. 2020). It shows how the lived experience of language is at once a site of coloniality and decoloniality. This co-occurrence of coloniality and decoloniality is conceptualised as cracks of decoloniality that constitute a utopia and dystopia at the same time (Oostendorp 2022b). As decolonial theory and praxis are inseparable, a decolonial approach warrants a project – a commitment to social action. The researcher initially set out to create a language intervention that would shape National Certificate Vocational (NC(V)) classroom practices. To this end, she created a workbook for English FAL to use in her teaching practice. However, the lack of sociolinguistic research on the TVET sector compelled the researcher to abandon the objective of facilitating an intervention in order to prioritise the filling of that literature gap. The workbook nonetheless forms a significant part of this dissertation as the researcher explores her experiences of creating and using the workbook in Paper 3. Its use in the English FAL classroom unleashed students’ multivoicedness, affirmed their diversity and revealed cracks of decoloniality. It is included as a supplement to the dissertation so that it can be freely accessible through Stellenbosch University’s library depository. As an additional resource, this workbook will ease lecturers’ teaching burden and will, for the first time, enable students to draw on all their linguistic and cultural resources in the English FAL classroom. To ensure its usefulness, the researcher endeavours to promote this workbook through her professional and social network.