Transitional justice (TJ) scenarios are where a society is moving from war to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy. A key goal of TJ is to balance atoning for past abuses of human rights with creating the conditions for social and political stability in the future, and this requires avoiding forms of "victor's justice" whereby one…

This paper focuses on code-switching (CS) in postcolonial (P-C) classrooms (e.g. Africa, Asia and Asia-Pacific) where the use of English has increased not only as a subject matter, but also as the language of instruction across all subjects. CS, a common behaviour among bilinguals and polyglots, refers broadly to the alternation between two or…

This paper reflects on the state of educational language policy two decades into a post-Apartheid South Africa caught between official multilingualism and English. The focus is on the national language-in-education policy (LiEP) that advocates additive bi/multilingualism, and a provincial counterpart, the language transformation plan (LTP). Using…

This paper examines the divergences between what educational policy calls for in South African schools with regard to language and learning and what takes place in schools. It argues that South African constitutional and education policy statements employ an idea of languages as bound entities and systems, and combine this understanding of…

This article examines the phenomenon of African migration to post-apartheid South Africa from a language-sociological perspective. Although the subject has been one largely neglected by language scholars, the handful of studies which have addressed the issue have yielded ethnographic data and raised questions of considerable significance for the…

South Africa is a multilingual, multicultural context that poses communication challenges to health professionals. In a clinical trial, information must be thoroughly understood by participants in order for consent to be informed. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. This pilot study aimed to identify communication successes and breakdowns…

The main argument of this overview article is that the Bantu languages of South Africa should have a far more significant role in education. We contend that the strong preference for English as medium of instruction among black learners is largely responsible for their inadequate educational performance, particularly since most of these learners…

The Threshold Project examined the nature of the language and learning difficulties that black Standard Three (Std 3, or grade 5) children in South Africa experience when they change from their mother tongue to English as a medium of instruction and learning, a policy known as "delayed immersion." This report focuses on the first major…

The Threshold Project, a 3-year project that followed a 1985 pilot study, examined the nature of the language and learning difficulties that black Standard Three (Std 3, or grade 5) children in South Africa experience when they change from their mother tongue of Sepedi to English as a medium of instruction and learning, a policy known as…