The emergence of COVID-19 resulted in the immediate indefinite suspension of traditional contact classes across the world in a bid to contain the spread of the virus. This disrupted the normal instructional routine leaving institutions with only one option: e-learning. E-learning is a technological pedagogy that supports teaching and learning using electronic mail, the internet, the world wide web and can either be synchronous or asynchronous. Today's multilingual technology has gone beyond the question of which language dominates the educational space. The acknowledgment and accommodation of heteroglossic perspectives in e-learning rejects engraved ideologies that posit monolingualism as a norm in education. It further justifies acknowledging that multilingualism is not new, even if the dramatic secularisation of the term seems recent. Through sociolinguistic lens embedded in the funds of knowledge, this chapter seeks to explore the role language plays in e-learning and how educators can use multilingualism as a teaching/learning resource.
TopIntroduction
During the colonial era, education in Southern Africa was used to keep the black majority under thumb and inseminate Eurocentrism and white preeminence. More than two decades after the end of colonialism in the region, education remains largely Eurocentric (Charamba, 2017). While there have been considerable strides in deracialising academic institutions in the region, the historically white academic entities remain institutionally white spaces for black students, staff, and academics (Fatyela et al., 2018). The academic institutions have failed to address their own respective colonial legacy and become public entities for all students in a democratic society (Garcia, 2020). This, among other things, is reflected through financial and language exclusion, unchanged institutional cultures, racist incidents, lack of transformation in academia and the Eurocentric curriculum. Among these, language exclusion seems to be bristling throughout the breadth and depth of the region especially in the education precinct (McKinney & Tyler, 2019).
Countries in the Southern African region are still trying to revamp existing language policies which gave prominence to colonial languages as calls for academic decolonisation are getting louder by the day (Charamba, 2020b). The epistemic violence stems from the fact that the colonial model of academic organisation of the education sector, largely based on Western disciplinary knowledge, was entrenched during the colonial era and has not been redressed in any serious way, including the languages of instruction (Fatyela et al., 2018) resulting in what we would coin linguistic colonialism. In present day classrooms in South Africa, students are taught in either English or Afrikaans language, which, according to Statistics South Africa (2019), happen to be the home language of only about 19.7% (comprising whites, coloureds and Indians/Asians) of the student populace.
This leaves about 80.3% of the students in what we coined ‘the linguistic wilderness’ where they are being taught through a language they have limited or no proficiency at all. By linguistic wilderness the authors mean a situation where students are subjected to languages they have no or little proficiency in. This, therefore in the authors’ view, makes it difficult for them to find their ‘way’ around the ‘wilderness’ (by not being able to- comprehend the spoken or written word).
This has resulted in the use of both languages (English and Afrikaans) as means of instruction being singled out as a major cause for the academic underachievement among students whose home language is different from these two (Department of Basic Education, 2017). The medium of instruction in South African schools has always been a source of contention, a noteworthy example being the Soweto uprising which took place in 1976 in which thousands of black South African learners protested against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction (Grinker, 2014). Having been educators for about two decades, we can relate with the aforesaid. In one of the studies we carried out on the effect of English in Science education in Fezile-Dabi district in the Free State province in the year 2016, 98 eleventh-grade students from two high schools were given a simple English language proficiency test with eighty (80) items to assess their proficiency in the language of instruction (Charamba, 2017).
Of the two high schools, one is a private school that offers English as a Home Language (EHL) and the other is a public high school which offers English as a First Additional Language (EFAL) and both schools teach Science through English language. Of the 98 students, only 15 (all from the private school) attained a mark of 30% or higher. This meant that only 1 in every 6.5 students passed the test according to Department of Education standards, where 30% is regarded as a pass (Department of Education, 2011) for additional languages (Charamba, 2017). At the second school, a public one, all students scored below 30% in the English language proficiency test.