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Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of English language classrooms in a South African township, this book highlights linguistic expertise in a setting where it is not usually expected or sought. Rather than being ‘peripheral and unskilled’, South African township teachers and learners emerge as skilled (re)languagers central to the workings of South African education, and to our understanding of how language classrooms work. This book foregrounds the heterogeneity, flexibility and creativity of day-to-day language practices that African urban spaces are known for, and conceptualises language teaching not as a progression from one fixed language to another, but as a circular sorting process between linguistic heterogeneity (languaging) and homogeneity (a standard language).
In this book Lara Krause provides an evidence-based and nuanced analysis of English language classrooms in a township setting. Guided by a comprehensive understanding of relevant research and theory, she meticulously develops and uses the lens of (re)languaging to foreground the tension between linguistic fluidity and fixity, heterogeneity and homogeneity in language classrooms. Clearly argued and compelling, this book provides new insights into the complex relationships between language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity.
Lara Krause presents a startlingly innovative, deeply meditative, yet meticulously reasoned and entirely convincing, approach to educational languaging. Substantiating her exhaustive interrogation of prevailing hypotheses with a thoroughgoing analysis of what actually happens in a township classroom, Krause develops a bold new conceptual framework.
Lara-Stephanie Krause is Assistant Professor in the Institute of African Studies, Leipzig University, Germany. Her research interests include fixity / fluidity of language in education, (trans)languaging, language and protest movements, actor-network theory, and science and technology studies.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Relanguaging Language towards an Alternative Perspective
Chapter 3. A Linguistic Ethnography for Seeing More
Chapter 4. An Eagle Learning to Fly and an Analyst Learning to See
Chapter 5. Complexities around Uing and Testing in Khayelitsha
Chapter 6. Rewriting Nomolanguages
Chapter 7. Conclusion: So What?
Notes
Appendices
References