Ambivalence among second-year students at a South African university about writing academically in an African language

Abstract

The new language policy for higher education advocates the use of African languages in different academic discourses as a means of developing and intellectualising these languages in academia. Academic writing is one of the important discourses through which students construct and access knowledge in higher education. However, this domain has largely been dominated using English at the expense of African languages. This study therefore seeks to explore ambivalence about writing academically in isiZulu among second-year students majoring in mother-tongue isiZulu modules. The study draws from the language-as-problem and language-as-resource conceptual framework to explore students’ perspectives on academic writing. The findings show that, on the one hand, students are caught up in a nexus of multiple linguistic cultures influenced by globalising forces and racialised societal discourses that denigrate indigenous languages. On the other hand, they provide examples of the affordances of embracing students’ multilingual repertoires in academic writing and further show evidence of changing ideologies and hope for language re-intellectualisation. Ambivalence needs to be studied further as a means of dealing with linguistic cultures that have a negative influence on the functional status of indigenous African languages.