The Carry-over Effect of Monolingual Teacher Education Programmes: Towards a Decolonized University

Abstract

Since the dawn of the twenty-first Century, multilingualism has become a global norm where minoritized languages continue to receive some attention. Increasingly, South Africa has been a destination for immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa due to its status as the economic hub in the continent. Unlike in the other countries where immigrant languages and cultures have relatively received some attention, the South African universities experience basic challenges with adopting local languages that have an official status and policy mandate as languages of research, learning and teaching. Worth noting, however, is that teachers have not been prepared to teach multilingual children in linguistically diverse classrooms. While research on the use of multilingual pedagogies such as translanguaging has been influential in the last five years, very little is known about the effects of monolingual, monolithic universities on teacher education and professional practices in the schools. In this chapter, we explore how post-Apartheid language in education policy practices at South African universities have influenced preparing teachers for multilingual classrooms. Drawing from the field of translanguaging, we use case study of a primary school in Johannesburg to track how higher education institutional identities have had a colonial carry-over effect on pedagogical practices in the local schools. In the end, we offer suggestions for a multilingual identity development language and literacy education teacher education programmes to valorize translingual approach in a manner that affirm multilingual post-Apartheid schooling in South Africa. Insights on future research directives in comparable contexts are highlighted at the end of the chapter.