The mandate of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning at the NWU includes the facilitation of cross-curricular events that affirm the values espoused by the university, as well as create opportunities to host and facilitate critical and courageous conversations about important social issues concerning language.
The annual Language Awareness week celebrates language, languages and multilingualism and aims to foster increased awareness of the diversity of languages in South Africa and the need to become sensitised to this diversity as lecturers and students. The aim of the language awareness week is to provide platforms where NWU students, staff, members of the broader South African and global community can explore these issues.
BAQONDE will feature on the final day of the LAW week in a session on Issues in Multilingual learning and teaching. Five Baqonde representatives have been invited to pre-record short answers to the following questions:
- Please comment on how you see the use of multilingual strategies such as glossaries and translanguaging in teaching and learning activities providing epistemological access to subject disciplines for students.
– - Please comment on the use of the student’s own linguistic repertoires for learning activities compared to using a standardized form of the African languages.
– - Please comment on the introduction of multilingual pedagogies at higher education level when most students have learned through English MoI, especially at secondary school level.
There will be a panel discussion following the presentation of the pre-recorded responses where NWU lecturers will provide feedback on the responses and discuss their experiences of the implementation of multilingual teaching and learning at the NWU. This will afford Baqonde team members and exciting opportunity to present their views on the development and increased use of the African languages in the academic domain.