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Caroline Kerfoot and Christopher Stroud Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University

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Overview situate UWC within the broader tertiary education landscape argue for enaggement with complex new forms of linguistic and social diversity and a critical rethinking of the nature of multilingualism and language policy sketch how an alternative understanding of multilingualism for academic literacy may address some of the issues of power and voice that currently constrain epistemological access, that is, access to the knowledge that universities distribute (Morrow, 2007, p. 18), and consequently the transformation of HE. suggest a policy development process that moves from micro- interaction to macro-structure 2

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Change in post-1994 South African higher education a constant state of institutional and programmatic change since 1994 stasis or unwelcome continuities with the apartheid past (Badat, 2009) but at the same time innovations underway which place South Africa in the "forefront of higher education and transformation discussion" (Soudien, 2011, p. 20). address not only issues of social inclusion and conceptual access but also critical new approaches to the mediation and production of knowledge. 3

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The South African Tertiary Landscape High levels of poverty and continuing patterns of historical disadvantage, failures of the primary school system, and the inability generally of many state institutions to cater to the needs of the population, will continue to dominate sociopolitical development for the foreseeable future. Recent statistics show that on all socio-economic measures, South Africa has regressed significantly in the years since the first free elections in 1994 (Marais, 2011). 4

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Challenges: SA education system and international benchmarks International PIRLS literacy study ( 2006, 2011) South Africa came last out of 38 countries after countries like Morocco, Indonesia and Iran. Around 80% of South Africas Grade 4 and Grade 5 learners attained not even the most basic reading literacy, the low benchmark, as against 6% internationally. And only 2% of South African learners reached the high benchmark. (Baer et al. 2007) HSRC study of the Language and Mathematics Skills of Grade 8 Learners in the Western Cape in 2006 found that over 30% of learners in Grade 8 appear to have no more than emergent literacy skills and a further 24% can barely read or write. 5

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The University of the Western Cape (UWC) an engaged university with a vision statement from hope to action through knowledge. established in 1960 as a bilingual English/Afrikaans university college for people classified as coloured. meant to produce the administrative corps for the bantustan and department of Indian Affairs and Coloured Affairs bureaucracies and to assist [] in the project of separate development (Gordon, 1957, cited in Anderson, 2003, p. 34). Ten Bantustans (black African homelands) were established under apartheid in order to create ethnically homogeneous territories which could later serve as the basis for creating an "autonomous" nation state for each ethnic group. aligned itself to the national-liberation movement (Anderson, 2003) and created the countrys first nonracial, open admissions policy (UWC, 1982). committed to the admission of students from poor communities a very large proportion of students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds 6

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First Language/s Given By Students on Enrolment at the University of the Western Cape: A Comparison of 2001 and 2010 (UWC, 2011) First language/s given on enrolment Afri- kaans Afrik. and English Isi- Xhosa Other African languages Eng. Total % NOT English first language Total student number % under- graduate students 2001 1671 (16%) 1039 (10%) 3637 (35%) 1182 (11%) 2693 (26%) 7806 (74%) 10,49976% 2010 2737 (15%) 931 (5%) 4509 (25%) 1449 (8%) 7765 (42%) 10529 (58%) 18,29479% 7

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Reading the data an increase in the number of students claiming English as a first language from 26% in 2001 to 42% in 2010, which is in line with broader studies of language shift in the Western Cape and South Africa more broadly (Anthonissen, 2009; Kamwangamalu, 2003; McCormick; 2002; Webb, 2002). sociolinguistic reality is that the variety of English spoken in many homes and produced in classrooms differs from the variety of academic English expected at university, that many of these households remain in fact bi-, if not multilingual (Dyers, 2008; Plddemann, Braam, October, & Wababa, 2004), in some homes codeswitching itself could be considered a language variety (McCormick, 2002; Paxton, 2009). 8

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So A majority of students registered during the past decade could therefore be considered either bi- or multilingual to varying degrees. Furthermore, it is safe to assume on the basis of South Africas performance on international and local benchmark tests (see Soudien, 2007) that a substantial number of these students did not have access to academic registers to any significant degree in any language. Despite the obvious challenges thus arising from cohorts of highly bi/multilingual students entering the universities with palpable inadequacies in English academic literacy, language as an issue remains all but invisible in national assessments of the challenges facing HE generally (see Scott, 2009; Boughey, 2010). 9

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