Browsing by Author "Mashazi, Simangele"

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    Entanglements of semiotic resources and space in the language portraits of Stellenbosch University staff and students
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Mashazi, Simangele; Oostendorp, Marcelyn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the lived experiences of minority language speakers at Stellenbosch University. The concept of linguistic repertoires is a central part of this study as it investigates the diverse linguistic repertoires participants bring with them to Stellenbosch University and how they use them to position themselves in the campus environment. This thesis included 15 participants who are either staff or students at Stellenbosch University. The study provides an in-depth discussion of language portraits, a methodological tool that is increasingly used in applied linguistics research (Busch 2012; Bristowe 2013; Prasad 2016; Singer 2018). Language portraits are art-based multimodal research instruments that produce data in the form of biographical narratives. Such data foregrounds the voice and perspective of the subject making it possible to trace the development of the linguistic repertoire across a life time. It also provides a clearer picture of the entanglements of language and other social issues such as gender, class, identity, etc. This study is narrative driven as it aims to foreground the voices of the participants by allowing them to tell their own stories and be part of interpreting the meaning as well. Chapters two and three are centered on the stories of two participants, respectively and from their narratives connections are drawn to the theory. This thesis also investigates how the participants experience spaces on and around campus. It provides insight into how people read and interpret semiotic resources in the spaces they inhabit. Data was collected by using the participatory photo interview method (Kolb 2008) that invites participants to be part of collecting data about their surroundings, by taking photos of it. Participants were instructed to take pictures of anything in the spaces they move through in their daily lives that make them feel welcome and unwelcome and to provide brief explanations of their choice of pictures. The conclusions drawn from how participants experience spaces on campus and what they can accomplish with their linguistic repertoires paints a grim picture. The environment is portrayed as a place where rich linguistic repertoires are silenced, diversity is denied and people struggle to find spaces that truly feel welcome. This in turn affects where people choose to move and how much freedom they have to express themselves. Theoretically, this study contributes to the movement in sociolinguistics which argues for language to be ‘disinvented’ and ‘reconstituted’ (Makoni and Pennycook 2005) and for a linguistic landscape to be viewed as multisensorial and multimodal (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Pennycook and Otsuji 2014). The study also attempts to show that in order for students to feel welcome at SU, more than just language needs to be attended to.