Browsing by Subject "language"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    An exploratory study of the experiences of student support officers offering counselling services to students at TVET Colleges in the Western Cape
    (2025) Naidoo, Sashen; Ward, Catherine; Titi, Neziswa
    This study explored the experiences of student support officers (SSOs) who offer counselling services to students at Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges in the Western Cape province, South Africa. Methodologically, the study employs a phenomenological approach as its focus is on experience-generated knowledge. It is thus located within the qualitative paradigm to give voice and the perspectives of the SSOs. Previous literature demonstrates that students historically sought counselling primarily for academic and career purposes. However, over time, the nature and type of counselling students required became increasingly complex with greater expectations of counsellors at higher education institutions. Therefore, further research is necessary to better understand this consequential phenomenon from the perspective of the SSOs through their meaning-making. This study found that SSOs experienced their role to be ill-defined, fluid and riddled with challenges of language and culture thus affecting the quality of meaningful counselling. This study offers recommendations emanating from interviews with SSOs. This study is germane to governance in TVET colleges in the Western Cape but may offer insights to other institutions of higher learning.
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    Exploring the impact of language on consumer-brand relationships across digital media
    (2021) Greyling, Caroline; Bundwini, Nqobile
    Within the marketing management sphere, consumer-brand relationship theory has attracted interest and academic research since its inception. One area that has been relatively unexplored, however, is the interplay between vernacular languages and consumer-brand relationships in a multilingual South Africa. Celebrated for its multicultural and multilingual identity, South Africa recognises eleven official languages with English predominantly used across marketing activities. Despite a variety of research projects aimed at exploring consumer-brand relationship theory, there remains a gap in the knowledge regarding how languages impact the relationships that consumers form with brands. Previous research has been centred on the Western and Asian markets and has failed to address the challenges of the diverse South African market. Consumers experience an emotional link and a sense of attachment to their home language. This paper postulates that this connection extends to consumer-brand relationships and that language choice can, therefore, impact the formation and development of brand relationships. This paper sought to explore this theory, using qualitative research methods. In-depth interviews were conducted in order to collect information about consumers' experiences and feelings regarding this topic. Fourteen participants from various language groups were asked a series of open-ended questions and their responses recorded. Results demonstrated that the use of first languages can influence how consumers respond to brands and can affect a number of elements identified in the brand-relationship quality model. The analysis found a link between language use and brand relationship theory, finding that the use of consumers' mother tongues can lead to consumers developing relationship qualities including love and passion, self-connection and commitment. This demonstrates that language can play a significant role in impacting consumer-brand relationships. We, therefore, infer that language can potentially impact consumer-brand relationships, and that language choice has the power to impact how consumers build relationships with brands.
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    How can Speech Language Therapists and Audiologists enhance language and literacy outcomes in South Africa? (And why we urgently need to)
    (AOSIS, 2011) Kathard, Harsha; Ramma, Lebogang; Pascoe, Michelle; Jordaan, Heila; Moonsamy, Sharon; Wium, Anna-Marie; Du Plessis, Sandra; Pottas, Lidia; Khan, Nasim Banu
    Basic education in South Africa faces a crisis as learners fail to achieve the necessary outcomes in the related areas of language and literacy. The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we aim to describe and discuss the education crisis by outlining the educational landscape, relevant policy imperatives and implementation challenges in post-apartheid education. The systemic factors contributing to the literacy crisis are emphasised. Secondly, we argue that speech language therapists and audiologists (SLTAs) have a role to play in supporting basic education in South Africa through developing language and literacy. It is suggested that the professions of speech-language pathology and audiology must be socially responsive and population-focused in order to make meaningful contributions to development in South Africa. The potential roles of SLTAs are discussed with suggestions for further actions required by the professions to enable a contextually relevant practice in a resource-constrained environment.
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    Performativity and gameplay: gender, race, and desire amongst a team of League of Legends players
    (2020) Whitfield, Kirsten/Waker; Deumert, Andrea
    Computer gaming is an important and growing form of popular media that has many cognitive and social benefits for players. It has also developed a reputation for being a white-male pastime and barring access for people who fall outside of that social grouping. While statistics show that this is increasingly not the case, certain games, particularly those that fall under the category of eSports, do attract largely male player bases. League of Legends is one such game. With Butler's Performativity Theory as a theoretical starting point, a qualitative sociolinguistic study was undertaken into the gendered dynamics of a male-dominated clan of League of Legends players. The data, collected primarily via audio-recordings of player interactions between games, is used as the basis for a sociolinguistic case study that looks at how performativity plays itself out in an environment that is characterised by a strong gender bias. With a focus on a Coloured female gamer in a League of Legends team, this paper explores the ways in which she and her teammates construct their own genders within this particular sociolinguistic context. The relationship between identity and desire, which has been a point of debate in sociolinguistics, is discussed in the context of the clan's interactions. Here I focus on the debate between Cameron and Kulick on the one hand and Bucholtz and Hall on the other. The paper looks into ways in which desire and identity interact with each other during sociolinguistic interaction. Moreover, issues around the construction of gender, race and sexuality are central to the study. The paper uses the data collected to look into the ways that social identities are collaboratively constructed, and contested. The discussion shows that while the team members replicate the gender binary, they do so by simultaneously reifying and challenging gendered norms. The study provides a compelling look into the ways in which gender identities are played with in interaction, and sheds some light on the fluidity of performative identity while simultaneously sketching out the ways that such performance is limited by its environment.
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    Politics Writing Centre
    (2012-11) Eaton, Liberty; Freeman, Laura; Heard, Pasqua; Matlhaga, Tshimologo; Mulaudzi, Masana
    The lesson plans can be divided into roughly four-five categories: parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation and rules surrounding the English language: 1. The parts of speech section is designed to help students refine their understanding of nouns, adjectives, adverbs and the basic parts of speech that create sentences. These ground rules are essential for understanding how to create sentences, which is the next section, sentence structure. These lesson plans are tailored to teach students how to write sentences and include exercises to help students apply what they have learned. 2. Within sentence structure students will be taught how to write complex and compound sentences that are often characteristic of academic writing. In addition, they will be taught how to vary sentence styles in order to avoid tedious writing that is difficult to read. 3. Punctuation is important for students who use it incorrectly and includes a series of lesson plans on commas, semi-colons and apostrophes. Often, students make errors when using this punctuation because they do not understand the rules that govern their use. These lesson plans address this issue. 4. The lesson plans on the rules when writing in English cover topics such as the difference between you’re and your or how to write in active and passive voice. 5. Lastly, the comprehension lesson plan aims to bring together all of the above to test the student’s understanding. Despite their relationship to one another, lesson plans are designed to be able to stand alone. This means that if a student only struggles with using comas, then that can be the only lesson the consultant uses. Once a consultant has identified the different challenges faced by a student, they are meant to create a collection of the lesson plans that best address that student’s needs. Where appropriate, lessons have been numerically organised according to a logical flow, e.g. the lesson plan on types sentences comes before the lesson on fragments. This ordering is merely a suggestion of how you might order the lessons. The Centre is meant to be a ‘fluid’ organization that adapts its teaching material to what students need when it comes to learning English. This is the great advantage of the one-on-one consultations. This series of lesson plans aims to help students who struggle with certain aspects of language and grammar. They have been developed with the Political Studies department at UCT and, as such, contain examples and illustrations from within the field. The nature of the plans means that they can, however, be adapted and used much more widely. The plans should be used selectively to suit the needs of the individual students. The plans are designed for one-on-one or small group consultations.
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    Positioning (in) the discipline: undergraduate students' negotiations of disciplinary discourses
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Kapp, Rochelle; Bangeni, Bongi
    This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically 'white' South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities.
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    Researching 'ideological becoming' in lectures: challenges for knowing differently
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Thesen, Lucia
    This article is a response to Haggis's injunction to 'know differently' if we are to grow our understandings of student learning. It identifies concerns that have arisen in the course of research into engagement (conceived of as 'ideological becoming') in first year lectures in the humanities at a South African university. These issues include: (a) how the co-presence of students and lecturer challenges conventional notions of 'student learning' as other; (b) the theoretical and practical challenges related to identifying fleeting 'liminal moments' in situations in which students and lecturers are co-present; and (c) what we can learn from a view of academic engagement as distributed across time and place. The tool of entextualisation is used to track participants' 'interest' across sites. The article offers a view of learning as embodied, emergent and contested, rather than neatly packaged and predictable.
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    The Role of Discourse in Development Work
    (2012) UCT Knowledge Co-op
    This study was an analysis of the power of discourse that positions development practitioners in the course of development work in a non-profit organisation in Cape Town. The research studied the interactions of four female development practitioners, who facilitated workshops on health and human rights using REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques) development methodology. The researcher assisted with the planning of workshops in return for practitioners' participation in the research.
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    Seeing the world as an African language speaker
    (2014-09-29) Dowling, Tessa
    This lecture will be of interest to anyone who wishes to know more about the relationship between language and culture. Go to Seeing the world as an African language speaker Is the way we see the world influenced by our language, or is it the other way around: is our language influenced by the way we see the world? You’ve all heard (the rather faulty) example of the Inuit having many words for snow – and maybe even have heard of the South American language called Yagan with a word Mamihlapinatapei which refers to the desirous look two people give each other when they want to start something but are too hesitant to do so (what a wistful, romantic culture, you might think!) But what about here in South Africa? What is it about African languages that makes them uniquely different and astonishingly original in the way they are put together? This lecture will introduce you to some of the key features (both structural and metaphorical) of our languages, features essential to understanding their cultures.
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    The effects of language on the informativeness and accuracy of child witnesses in Kenya
    (2025) Kariuki, Moses; Tredoux, Colin
    This report describes the first prospective study that we are aware of specifically designed to assess the effects of language on children's informativeness and accuracy for a staged memory event one week after it occurred. The study took place in a school which is located in rural Central Kenya where Kikuyu is the dominant home language for the locals. Hence, all seventy-six 9-15-year-old Grade five pupils who took part in the study spoke Kikuyu as their home language. They also learnt English as a subject and used it as a language of instruction and examination for all the other subjects. However, Kiswahili is taught and examined as a standalone subject. The language of the memory event was Kiswahili. Half of the participants were interviewed about the memory event in their home language (Kikuyu) while the rest were interviewed in English, an official language of the court. The children who were interviewed in Kikuyu were significantly more informative and accurate about the event than those who were interviewed in English. The findings from this study are presented together with (and supported by) reports of four studies. First, through an analysis of the legal framework supporting child witnesses in Kenya, I found that children are supported by an impressive and progressive wide-ranging legal framework, recognising both home-grown and international instruments to which Kenya is a signatory. However, there is need for studies to establish whether these special measures are well implemented, and that they achieve what they are meant to achieve. Also, from a review of case law, it emerged that important language-related concerns exist. In addition, magistrates and prosecutors reported through a survey that a significant number of child witnesses in Kenyan courts either have some challenges communicating adequately in the language of the court or are totally unable to communicate in the language of the court. Finally, an analysis of actual court transcript of a child witness under examination-in chief and cross-examination presents some evidence that child witnesses in Kenya could be enduring poor interviewing practices. This thesis provides some credible evidence that child witnesses' home language should always take precedence when questioned in court or during investigations by police interlocutors. These findings have important empirical and applied implication in the field of forensic interviewing.
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    The reimagined migrant portrait - exploring the lives of Chinese and Taiwanese minorities living in South Africa
    (2019) Hsu, Tzu Ting; Wasserman, Hermanus
    This multimedia project explores the lives of Chinese and Taiwanese migrants living in South Africa and how language, culture, community and marginalisation have come to shape their identities and to visually represent them in a way that is not prevalent in mainstream media. It uses two visual mediums – photography and video interviews – to understand these migrants’ experiences, how they perceive themselves and how they think society perceives them. Data analysis consisted of a process of coding the video interviews and structural analysis of the visuals. Rising worldwide migration has simultaneously increased the spread of diasporic communities. China’s positionality as an economic powerhouse and the influx of East Asian migrants to South Africa in recent years has shone a light on this minority population group. However, much of what is known about them tends to be through forms of mass media which perpetuates stereotypical representations. This paper draws on various literature including acculturation, diasporic communities, representation, languaging and xenophobia to explore the lives of East Asian migrants living in South Africa and search for more empowered forms of representation.