South Africa in recent years has seen a student protest movement which has sought to ‘decolonise’ the university – epitomized by the #RMF protests in 2015 to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist, from the campus of the University of Cape Town. Our unit, the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town, has been responding to these student calls through a series of research projects and curriculum changes which have sought to find ways to decolonize the humanities (arts and social sciences) curriculum and pedagogy at our university.

One of the central aspects of teaching and learning that we have focused on is the use of language and languaging practices in lecture theatres, tutorials, and assessments. South Africa has 11 official languages, yet in the university space, English is privileged as the language of teaching and learning. This situation has come under the spotlight during the student protests – the use of English disadvantages our many students who speak other languages as their first language; especially in the humanities there must be room in the curriculum for other South African and African languages, both in terms of pedagogy and assessment, and in the texts which students study and engage with.

In one of our courses, called ‘Texts in the Humanities’ we have for several years been accepting essay submissions in any language that the student prefers to write in. This includes ‘translanguaging’ – moving between languages and dialects in the text. Translanguaging in essays, and also in lectures and tutorials has become an important way for us to challenge the anglonormative, monolingual culture of the university.

In our current research we are using Systemic Functional Linguistics to investigate the affordances of translanguaging for student writing – what semantic patterns emerge when students use different languages and dialects, and for what different purposes – for example, how they may use an African language to write about cultural and personal aspects of their lives, and switch to English for academic concepts and theory. We are also investigating how arguments are constructed in and between the different languages used in students’ essays. In this way we hope to highlight the validity of using different languages in the academic space, and to showcase translanguaging as inclusive pedagogic practice.

University of Cape Town Translanguaging cluster team – Jumani Clarke, Ellen Hurst, Kathy Luckett, Msakha Mona, Shannon Morreira, Tammy Wilks